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EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY 



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SHELLEY 



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JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 










NEW YORK 

HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS 

FRANKLIN SQUARE 






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CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. 

PAGE 

Birth and Childhood 1 

CHAPTER II. 
Eton and Oxford 12 

CHAPTER m. 
Life in London, and First Marriage 39 

CHAPTER IV. 
Second Residence in London, and Separation from Harriet . 12 

CHAPTER V. 

Life at Marlow, and Journey to Italy .... 95 

CHAPTER VI. 
Residence at Pisa 131 

CHAPTER VH. 
Last Days >. 169 

CHAPTER Vni. 
Epilogue 183 



LIST OF ATTTHOKITIES. 



1. The Poetical and Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited 
by Mrs. Shelley. Moxon, 1840, 1845. 1 vol. 

2. The Poetical Works, edited by Harry Buxton Forman. Reeves 
and Turner, 1 876-7. 4 vols. 

3. The Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by W. M. Rossetti. 
Moxon, 1870. 2 vols. 

4. Hogg's Life of Shelley. Moxon, 1858. 2 vols. 

5. Trelawny's Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author. Pick- 
ering, 1878. 2 vols. 

6. Shelley Memorials, edited by Lady Shelley. Smith and Elder, 
lvol. 

7. Medwin's Life of Shelley. Newby, 1847. 2 vols. 

8. Shelley's Early Life, by D. F. McCarthy. Chatto and Windus. 
lvol. 

9. Leigh Hunt's Autobiography. Smith and Elder. 

10. W. M. Rossetti's Life of Shelley, included in the edition above 
cited, No. 3. 

11. Shelley, a Critical Biography, by G. B. Smith. David Douglas, 

1877. 

12. Relics of Shelley, edited by Richard Garnett. Moxon, 1862. 

13. Peacock's Articles on Shelley in Fraser's Magazine, 1858 and 
1860. 



viii LIST OF AUTHORITIES. 

14. Shelley in Pall Mall, by R. Garnett, in Macmillan's Magazine, 
June, 1860. 

15. Shelley's Last Days, by R. Garnett, in the Fortnightly Review, 
June, 1878. 

16. Two Lectures on Shelley, by W. M. Rossetti, in the University 
Magazine, February and March, 1878. 



SHELLEY. 

CHAPTER I. 

BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD. 

It is worse than useless to deplore the irremediable; yet 
no man, probably, has failed to mourn the fate of mighty 
poets, whose dawning gave the promise of a glorious day, 
but who passed from earth while yet the light that shone 
in them was crescent. That the world should know Mar- 
lowe and Giorgione, Raphael and Mozart, only by the prod- 
ucts of their early manhood, is indeed a cause for lamenta- 
tion, when we remember what the long lives of a Bach and 
Titian, a Michelangelo and Goethe, held in reserve for their 
maturity and age. It is of no use to persuade ourselves, 
as some have done, that we possess the best work of men 
untimely slain. Had Sophocles been cut off in his prime, 
before the composition of (Eclijms ; had Handel never 
merged the fame of his forgotten operas in the immortal 
music of his oratorios ; had Milton been known only by 
the poems of his youth, we might with equal plausibility 
have laid that flattering unction to our heart. And yet 
how shallow would have been our optimism, how falla- 
cious our attempt at consolation. There is no denying 
1* 



2 SHELLEY. [chap. 

the fact that when a young Marcellus is shown by fate 
for one brief moment, and withdrawn before his spring- 
time has brought forth the fruits of summer, we must bow 
in silence to the law of waste that rules inscrutably in 
nature. 

Such reflections are forced upon us by the lives of three 
great English poets of this century. Byron died when he 
was thirty-six, Keats when he was twenty-five, and Shelley 
when he was on the point of completing his thirtieth year. 
Of the three, Keats enjoyed the briefest space for the de- 
velopment of his extraordinary powers. His achievement, 
perfect as it is in some poetic qualities, remains so imma- 
ture and incomplete that no conjecture can be hazarded 
about his future. Byron lived longer, and produced more 
than his brother poets. Yet he was extinguished when 
his genius was still ascendant, when his "swift and fair 
creations" were issuing like worlds from an archangel's 
hands. In his case we have perhaps only to deplore the 
loss of masterpieces that might have equalled, but could 
scarcely have surpassed, what we possess. Shelley's early 
death is more to be regretted. Unlike Keats and Byron, 
he died by a mere accident. His faculties were far more 
complex, and his aims were more ambitious than theirs. 
He therefore needed length of years for their co-ordina- 
tion ; and if a fuller life had been allotted him, we have 
the certainty that from the discords of his youth he would 
have wrought a clear and lucid harmony. 

These sentences form a somewhat gloomy prelude to a 
biography. Yet the student of Shelley's life, the sincere 
admirer of his genius, is almost forced to strike a solemn 
key-note at the outset. We are not concerned with one 
whose " little world of man " for good or ill was perfected, 
but with one whose growth was interrupted just before 



i.] BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD. 3 

the synthesis of which his powers were capable had been 
accomplished. 

August 4, 1792, is one of the most memorable dates 
in the history of English literature. On this day Percy 
Bysshe Shelley was born at Field Place, near Horsham, in 
the county of Sussex. His father, named Timothy, was 
the eldest son of Bysshe Shelley, Esquire, of Goring Castle, 
in the same county. The Shelley family could boast of 
great antiquity and considerable wealth. Without reck- 
oning earlier and semi-legendary honours, it may here be 
recorded that it is distinguished in the elder branch by 
one baronetcy dating from 1611, and by a second in the 
younger dating from 1806. In the latter year the poet's 
grandfather received this honour through the influence of 
his friend the Duke of Norfolk. Mr. Timothy Shelley* was 
born in the year 1753, and in 1791 he married Elizabeth, 
daughter of Charles Pilf old, Esquire, a lady of great beauty, 
and endowed with fair intellectual ability, though not of a 
literary temperament. The first child of this marriage was 
the poet, named Bysshe in compliment to his grandfather, 
the then living head of the family, and Percy because of 
some remote connexion with the ducal house of North- 
umberland. Four daughters, Elizabeth, Mary, Hellen, and 
Margaret, and one son, John, who died in the year 1866, 
were the subsequent issue of Mr. Timothy Shelley's mar- 
riage. In the year 1815, upon the death of his father, he 
succeeded to the baronetcy, which passed, after his own 
death, to his grandson, the present Sir Percy Florence Shel- 
ley, as the poet's only surviving son. 

Before quitting, once and for all, the arid region of gen- 
ealogy, it may be worth mentioning that Sir Bysshe Shel- 
ley by his second marriage with Miss Elizabeth Jane Syd- 
ney Perry, heiress of Penshurst, became the father of five 



4 SHELLEY. [chap. 

children, the eldest son of whom assumed the name of 
Shelley-Sidney, received a baronetcy, and left a son, Philip 
Charles Sidney, who was created Lord De l'Isle and Dud- 
ley. Such details are not without a certain value, inas- 
much as they prove that the poet, who won for his ancient 
and honourable house a fame far more illustrious than ti- 
tles can confer, was sprung from a man of no small per- 
sonal force and worldly greatness. Sir Bysshe Shelley 
owed his position in society, the wealth he accumulated, 
and the honours he transmitted to two families, wholly 
and entirely to his own exertions. Though he bore a 
name already distinguished in the annals of the English 
landed gentry, he had to make his own fortune under con- 
ditions of some difficulty. He was born in North America, 
and began life, it is said, as a quack doctor. There is also 
a legend of his having made a first marriage with a person 
of obscure birth in America. Yet such was the charm of 
his address, the beauty of his person, the dignity of his bear- 
ing, and the vigour of his will, that he succeeded in winning 
the hands and fortunes of two English heiresses ; and, having 
begun the world with nothing, he left it at the age of sev- 
enty-four, bequeathing 300,000£. in the English Funds, to- 
gether with estates worth 20,000/. a year to his descendants. 
Percy Bysshe Shelley was therefore born in the purple 
of the English squirearchy; but never assuredly did the 
old tale of the swan hatched with the hen's brood of duck- 
lings receive a more emphatic illustration than in this case. 
Gifted with the untameable individuality of genius, and 
bent on piercing to the very truth beneath all shams and 
fictions woven by society and ancient usage, he was driven 
by the circumstances of his birth and his surroundings into 
an exaggerated warfare with the world's opinion. His too 
frequent tirades against — 



i.] BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD. 5 

The Queen of Slaves, 
The hood-winked Angel of the blind and dead, 
Custom, — 

owed much of their asperity to the early influences 
brought to bear upon him by relatives who prized their 
position in society, their wealth, and the observance of 
conventional decencies, above all other things. 

Mr. Timothy Shelley was in no sense of the word a 
bad man ; but he was everything which the poet's father 
ought not to have been. As member for the borough of 
Shoreham, he voted blindly with his party ; and that par- 
ty looked to nothing beyond the interests of the gentry 
and the pleasure of the Duke of Norfolk. His philoso- 
phy was limited to a superficial imitation of Lord Ches- 
terfield, whose style he pretended to affect in his familiar 
correspondence, though his letters show that he lacked the 
rudiments alike of logic and of grammar. His religious 
opinions might be summed up in Clough's epigram : — 

At church on Sunday to attend 

Will serve to keep the world your friend. 

His morality in like manner was purely conventional, 
as may be gathered from his telling his eldest son that he 
would never pardon a mesalliance, but would provide for 
as many illegitimate children as he chose to have. For 
the rest, he appears to have been a fairly good landlord, 
and a not unkind father, sociable and hospitable, some- 
what vain and occasionally odd in manner, but qualified 
for passing muster with the country gentlemen around 
him. In the capacity to understand a nature which de- 
viated from the ordinary type so remarkably as Shelley's, 
he was utterly deficient ; and perhaps we ought to regard 
it as his misfortune that fate made him the father of a 



6 SHELLEY. [chap. 

man who was among the greatest portents of originality 
and unconventionally that this century has seen. To- 
ward an ordinary English youth, ready to sow his wild 
oats at college, and willing to settle at the proper age and 
take his place upon the bench of magistrates, Sir Timothy 
Shelley would have shown himself an indulgent father; 
and it must be conceded by the poet's biographer that if 
Percy Bysshe had but displayed tact and consideration on 
his side, many of the misfortunes which signalized his re- 
lations to his father would have been avoided. 

Shelley passed his childhood at Field Place, and when 
he was about six years old began to be taught, together 
with his sisters, by Mr. Edwards, a clergyman who lived at 
Warnham. What is recorded of these early years we owe 
to the invaluable^communications of his sister Hellen. 
The difference of age between her and her brother Bysshe 
obliges us to refer her recollections to a somewhat later 
period — probably to the holidays he spent away from 
Sion House and Eton. Still, since they introduce us to 
the domestic life of his then loved home, it may be proper 
to make quotations from them in this place. Miss Shel- 
ley tells us that her brother " would frequently come to 
the nursery, and was full of a peculiar kind of pranks. 
One piece of mischief, for which he was rebuked, was run- 
ning a stick through the ceiling of a low passage to find 
some new chamber, which could be made effective for 
some flights of his vivid imagination." He was very 
much attached to his sisters, and used to entertain them 
with stories, in which " an alchemist, old and grey, with a 
long beard," who was supposed to abide mysteriously in 
the garret of Field Place, played a prominent part. "An- 
other favourite theme was the i Great Tortoise,' that lived 
in Warnham Pond; and any unwonted noise was account- 



i] BIRTH AjnD CHILDHOOD. • 7 

ed for by the presence of this great beast, which was made 
into the fanciful proportions most adapted to excite awe 
and wonder." To his friend Hogg*, in after -years, Shel- 
ley often spoke about another reptile, no mere creature of 
myth or fable, the " Old Snake," who had inhabited the 
gardens of Field Place for several generations. This Ven- 
erable serpent was accidentally killed by the gardener's 
scythe ; but he lived long in the poet's memory, and it 
may reasonably be conjectured that Shelley's peculiar 
sympathy for snakes was due to the dim recollection of 
his childhood's favourite. Some of the games he invent- 
ed to please his sisters were grotesque, and some both per- 
ilous and terrifying. " We dressed ourselves in strange 
costumes to personate spirits or fiends, and Bysshe would 
take a fire-stove and fill it with some inflammable liquid, 
and carry it flaming into the kitchen and to the back 
door." Shelley often took his sisters for long country 
rambles over hedge and fence, carrying them when the 
difficulties of the ground or their fatigue required it. At 
this time " his figure was slight and beautiful, — his hands 
were models, and his feet are treading the earth again in 
one of his race ; his eyes too have descended in their wild 
fixed beauty to the same person. As a child, I have heard 
that his skin was like snow, and bright ringlets covered 
his head." Here is a little picture which brings the boy 
vividly before our eyes: "Bysshe ordered clothes accord- 
ing to his own fancy at Eton, and the beautifully fitting 
silk pantaloons, as he stood as almost all men and boys 
do, with their coat-tails near the fire, excited my silent 
though excessive admiration." 

When he was ten years of age, Shelley went to school 
at Sion House, Brentford, an academy kept by Dr. Green- 
law, and frequented by the sons of London tradesmen, 



8 SHELLEY. [chap. 

who proved but uncongenial companions to his gentle 
spirit. It is fortunate for posterity that one of his biog- 
raphers, his second cousin Captain Medwin, was his school- 
fellow at Sion House ; for to his recollections we owe 
some details of great value. Medwin tells us that Shelley 
learned the classic languages almost by intuition, while he 
seemed to be spending his time in dreaming, now watch- 
ing the clouds as they sailed across the school-room win- 
dow, and now scribbling sketches of fir-trees and cedars in 
memory of Field Place. At this time he was subject to 
sleep-walking, and, if we may credit this biographer, he 
often lost himself in reveries not far removed from trance. 
His favourite amusement was novel-reading; and to the 
many " blue books " from the Minerva press devoured by 
him in his boyhood, we may ascribe the style and tone of 
his first compositions. For physical sports he showed no 
inclination. "He passed among his school-fellows as a 
strange and unsocial being; for when a holiday relieved 
us from our tasks, and the other boys were engaged in 
such sports as the narrow limits of our prison-court al- 
lowed, Shelley, who entered into none of them, would pace 
backwards and forwards — I think I see him now — along 
the southern wall, indulging in various vague and unde- 
fined ideas, the chaotic elements, if I may say so, of what 
afterwards produced so beautiful a world." 

Two of Shelley's most important biographical compo- 
sitions undoubtedly refer to this period of his boyhood. 
The first is the passage in the Prelude to Laon and Cyth- 
na which describes his suffering among the unsympathetic 
inmates of a school — 

Thoughts of great deeds were mine, dear Friend, when first 
The clouds which wrap this world from youth did pass. 



i.] BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD. 9 

I do remember well the hour which burst 
My spirit's sleep : a fresh May-dawn it was, 
When I walked forth upon the glittering grass, 
And wept, I knew not why ; until there rose 
From the near school-room, voices, that, alas ! 
Were but one echo from a world of woes — 
The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes. 

And then I clasped my hands and looked around — 
— But none was near to mock my streaming eyes, 
Which poured their warm drops on the sunny ground — 
So without shame I spake : — " I will be wise, 
And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies 
Such power, for I grow weary to behold 
The selfish and the strong still tyrannize 
Without reproach or check." I then controlled 
My tears, my heart grew calm, and I was meek and bold. 

And from that hour did I with earnest thought 
Heap knowledge from forbidden mines of lore, 
Yet nothing that my tyrants knew or taught 
I cared to learn, but from that secret store 
Wrought linked armour for my soul, before 
It might walk forth to war among mankind. 
Thus power and hope were strengthened more and more 
Within me, till there came upon my mind 
A sense of loneliness, a thirst with which I pined. 

The second is a fragment on friendship preserved by- 
Hogg. After defining that kind of passionate attachment 
which often precedes love in fervent natures, he proceeds : 
"I remember forming an attachment of this kind at 
school. I cannot recall to my memory the precise epoch 
at which this took place; but I imagine it must have 
been at the age of eleven or twelve. The object of these 
sentiments was a boy about my own age, of a character 
eminently generous, brave, and gentle ; and the elements 



10 SHELLEY. [chap. 

of human feeling seemed to have been, from his birth, 
genially compounded within him. There was a delicacy 
and a simplicity in his manners, inexpressibly attractive. 
It has never been my fortune to meet with him since my 
school-boy days ; but either I confound my present recol- 
lections with the delusions of past feelings, or he is now 
a source of honour and utility to every one around him. 
The tones of his voice were so soft and winning, that 
every word pierced into my heart ; and their pathos was 
so deep, that in listening to him the tears have involun- 
tarily gushed from my eyes. Such was the being for 
whom I first experienced the sacred sentiments of friend- 
ship." How profound was the impression made on his 
imagination and his feelings by this early friendship, may 
again be gathered from a passage in his note upon the 
antique group of Bacchus and Ampelus at Florence. 
"Look, the figures are walking with a sauntering and 
idle pace, and talking to each other as they walk, as you 
may have seen a younger and an elder boy at school, 
walking in some grassy spot of the play-ground with that 
tender friendship for each other which the age inspires." 

These extracts prove beyond all question that the first 
contact with the outer world called into activity two of 
Shelley's strongest moral qualities — his hatred of tyran- 
ny and brutal force in any form, and his profound senti- 
ment of friendship. The admiring love of women, which 
marked him no less strongly, and which made him second 
only to Shakespere in the sympathetic delineation of a 
noble feminine ideal, had been already developed by his 
deep affection for his mother and sisters. It is said that 
he could not receive a letter from them without mani- 
fest joy. 

" Shelley," says Medvvin, " was at this time tall for his 



l] birth and CHILDHOOD, 11 

age, slightly and delicately built, and rather narrow-chest- 
ed, with a complexion fair and ruddy, a face rather long 
than oval. His features, not regularly handsome, were 
set off by a profusion of silky brown hair, that curled 
naturally. The expression of his countenance was one 
of exceeding sweetness and innocence. His blue eyes 
were very large and prominent. They were at times, 
when he was abstracted, as he often was in contemplation, 
dull, and as it were, insensible to external objects ; at oth- 
ers they flashed with the fire of intelligence. His voice 
was soft and low, but broken in its tones, — when any- 
thing much interested him, harsh and immodulated ; and 
this peculiarity he never lost. He was naturally calm, 
but when he heard of or read of some flagrant act of 
injustice, oppression, or cruelty, then indeed the sharp- 
est marks of horror and indignation were visible in his 
countenance." 

Such as the child was, we shall find the man to have 
remained unaltered through the short space of life allow- 
ed him. Loving, innocent, sensitive, secluded from the 
vulgar concerns of his companions, strongly moralized 
after a peculiar and inborn type of excellence, drawing 
his inspirations from Nature and from his own soul in 
solitude, Shelley passed across the stage of this world, 
attended by a splendid vision which sustained him at a 
perilous height above the kindly race of men. The pen- 
alty of this isolation he suffered in many painful episodes. 
The reward he reaped in a measure of more authentic 
prophecy, and in a nobler realization of his best self, than 
could be claimed by any of his immediate contemporaries. 



CHAPTER II. 

ETON AND OXFORD. 

In 1805 Shelley went from Sion House to Eton. At this 
time Dr. Keate was headmaster, and Shelley's tutor was 
a Mr. Bethel, " one of the dullest men in the establish- 
ment." At Eton Shelley was not popular either with 
his teachers or his elder school-fellows, although the boys 
of his own age are said to have adored him. " He was 
all passion," writes Mrs. Shelley; "passionate in his re- 
sistance to an injury, passionate in his love :" and this 
vehemence of temperament he displayed by organizing a 
rebellion against fagging, which no doubt won for him 
the applause of his juniors and equals. It was not to be 
expected that a lad intolerant of rule and disregardful of 
restriction, who neglected punctuality in the performance 
of his exercises, while he spent his leisure in translating 
half of Pliny's history, should win the approbation of 
pedagogues. At the same time the inspired opponent of 
the fagging system, the scorner of games and muscular 
amusements, could not hope to find much favour with 
such martinets of juvenile convention as a public school 
is wont to breed. At Eton, as elsewhere, Shelley's un- 
compromising spirit brought him into inconvenient con- 
tact with a world of vulgar usage, while his lively fancy 
invested the commonplaces of reality with dark hues 



il] ETON AND OXFORD. 13 

borrowed from his own imagination. Mrs. Shelley says 
of him, " Tamed by affection, but unconquered by blows, 
what chance was there that Shelley should be happy at 
a public school?" This sentence probably contains the 
pith of what he afterwards remembered of his own school 
life, and there is no doubt that a nature like his, at once 
loving and high-spirited, had much to suffer. It was a 
mistake, however, to suppose that at Eton there were any 
serious blows to bear, or to assume that laws of love which 
might have led a spirit so gentle as Shelley's, were adapt- 
ed to the common stuff of which the English boy is form- 
ed. The latter mistake Shelley made continually through- 
out his youth ; and only the advance of years tempered 
his passionate enthusiasm into a sober zeal for the im- 
provement of mankind by rational methods. We may 
also trace at this early epoch of his life that untamed in- 
tellectual ambition — that neglect of the immediate and 
detailed for the transcendental and universal — which was 
a marked characteristic of his genius, leading him to fly 
at the highest while he overleaped the facts of ordinary 
human life. "From his earliest years," says Mrs. Shelley, 
" all his amusements and occupations were of a daring, 
and in one sense of the term, lawless nature. He delight- 
ed to exert his powers, not as a boy, but as a man ; and 
so with manly powers and childish wit, he dared and 
achieved attempts that none of his comrades could even 
have conceived. His understanding and the early devel- 
opment of imagination never permitted him to mingle in 
childish plays ; and his natural aversion to tyranny pre 
vented him from paying due attention to his school duties. 
But he was always actively employed ; and although his 
endeavours were prosecuted with puerile precipitancy, yet 
his aim and thoughts were constantly directed to those 



14 SHELLEY. [chap. 

great objects which have employed the thoughts of the 
greatest among men ; and though his studies were not 
followed up according to school discipline, they were not 
the less diligently applied to." This high-soaring ambi- 
tion was the source both of his weakness and his strength 
in art, as well as in his commerce with the world of men. 
The boy who despised discipline and sought to extort her 
secrets from nature by magic, was destined to become the 
philanthropist who dreamed of revolutionizing society by 
eloquence, and the poet who invented in Prometheus Un- 
bound forms of grandeur too colossal to be animated with 
dramatic life. 

A strong interest in experimental science had been al- 
ready excited in him at Sion House by the exhibition of 
an orrery ; and this interest grew into a passion at Eton. 
Experiments in chemistry and electricity, of the simpler 
and more striking kind, gave him intense pleasure — the 
more so perhaps because they were forbidden. On one 
occasion he set the trunk of an old tree on fire with a burn- 
ing-glass : on another, while he was amusing himself with 
a blue flame, his tutor came into the room and received a 
severe shock from a highly-charged Leyden jar. During 
the holidays Shelley carried on the same pursuits at Field 
Place. " His own hands and clothes," says Miss Shelley, 
" were constantly stained and corroded with acids, and it 
only seemed too probable that some day the house would 
be burned down, or some serious mischief happen to him- 
self or others from the explosion of combustibles." This 
taste for science Shelley long retained. If we may trust 
Mr. Hogg's memory, the first conversation which that 
friend had with him at Oxford consisted almost wholly of 
an impassioned monologue from Shelley on the revolution 
to be wrought by science in all realms of thought. His 



il] ETON AND OXFORD. 15 

imagination was fascinated by the boundless vistas opened 
to the student of chemistry. When he first discovered 
that the four elements were not final, it gave him the 
acutest pleasure : and this is highly characteristic of the 
genius which was always seeking to transcend and reach 
the life of life withdrawn from ordinary gaze. On the 
other hand he seems to have delighted in the toys of sci- 
ence, playing with a solar microscope, and mixing strangest 
compounds in his crucibles, without taking the trouble 
to study any of its branches systematically. In his later 
years he abandoned these pursuits. But a charming remi- 
niscence of them occurs in that most delightful of his fa- 
miliar poems, the Letter to Maria Gisborne. 

While translating Pliny and dabbling in chemistry, 
Shelley was not wholly neglectful of Etonian studies. He 
acquired a fluent, if not a correct, knowledge of both 
Greek and Latin, and astonished his contemporaries by 
the facility with which he produced verses in the latter 
language. His powers of memory were extraordinary, 
and the rapidity with which he read a book, taking in 
seven or eight lines at a glance, and seizing the sense 
upon the hint of leading words, was no less astonishing. 
Impatient speed and indifference to minutiaB were indeed 
among the cardinal qualities of his intellect. To them 
we may trace not only the swiftness of his imaginative 
flight, but also his frequent satisfaction with the some- 
what less than perfect in artistic execution. 

That Shelley was not wholly friendless or unhappy at 
Eton may be gathered from numerous small circumstances. 
Hogg says that his Oxford rooms were full of handsome 
leaving books, and that he was frequently visited by old 
Etonian acquaintances. We are also told that he spent 
the 40/. gained by his first novel, Zastrozzi, on a farewell 



16 SHELLEY. [chap. 

supper to eight school -boy friends. A few lines, too, 
might be quoted from his own poem, the Boat on the 
Serchio, to prove that he did not entertain a merely dis- 
agreeable memory of his school life. 1 Yet the general 
experience of Eton must have been painful ; and it is sad 
to read of this gentle and pure spirit being goaded by his 
coarser comrades into fury, or coaxed to curse his father 
and the king for their amusement. It may be worth 
mentioning that he was called "the Atheist" at Eton; 
and though Hogg explains this by saying that " the Athe- 
ist" was an official character among the boys, selected 
from time to time for his defiance of authority, yet it is 
not improbable that Shelley's avowed opinions may even 
then have won for him a title which he proudly claimed 
in after-life. To allude to his boyish incantations and 
nocturnal commerce with fiends and phantoms would 
scarcely be needful, were it not that they seem to have 
deeply tinged his imagination. "While describing the 
growth of his own genius in the Hymn to Intellectual 
Beauty, he makes the following reference to circumstances 
which might otherwise be trivial : — 

While yet a boy, I sought for ghosts, and sped 

Thro' many a listening chamber, cave, and ruin, 

And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing 
Hopes of high talk with the departed dead. 
I call'd on poisonous names with which our youth is fed, 

I was not heard, I saw them not — 

When, musing deeply on the lot 
Of life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing 

All vital things that wake to bring 

News of birds and blossoming, — 

Sudden, thy shadow fell on me ; 
I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy ! 

1 Forman's edition, vol. iv. p. 115. 



il] ETON AND OXFORD. 17 

Among the Eton tutors was one whose name will al- 
ways be revered by Shelley's worshippers ; for he alone 
discerned the rare gifts of the strange and solitary boy, 
and Shelley loved him. Dr. Lind was an old man, a phy- 
sician, and a student of chemistry. Shelley spent long 
hours at his house, conversing with him, and receiving 
such instruction in philosophy and science as the grey- 
haired scholar could impart. The affection which united 
them must have been of no common strength or quality ; 
for when Shelley lay ill of a fever at Field Place, and 
had conceived the probably ill-founded notion that his 
father intended to place him in a mad -house, he man- 
aged to convey a message to his friend at Eton, on the 
receipt of which Dr. Lind travelled to Horsham, and by 
his sympathy and skill restored the sick boy's confidence. 
It may incidentally be pointed out that this story, credit- 
ed as true by Lady Shelley in her Memorials, shows how 
early an estrangement had begun between the poet and 
his father. We look, moreover, vainly for that mother's 
influence which might have been so beneficial to the boy 
in whom "love and life were twins, born at one birth." 
From Dr. Lind Shelley not only received encouragement 
to pursue his chemical studies ; but he also acquired the 
habit of corresponding with persons unknown to him, 
whose opinions he might be anxious to discover or dis- 
pute. This habit, as we shall see in the sequel, deter- 
mined Shelley's fate on two important occasions of his 
life. In return for the help extended to him at Eton, 
Shelley conferred undying fame on Dr. Lind; the char- 
acters of Zonaras in Prince Athanase, and of the hermit 
in Laon and Cythna, are portraits painted by the poet of 
his boyhood's friend. 

The months which elapsed between Eton and Oxford 
2 



18 SHELLEY. [chap. 

were an important period in Shelley's life. At this time 
a boyish liking for his cousin, Harriet Grove, ripened into 
real attachment ; and though there was perhaps no for- 
mal engagement between them, the parents on both sides 
looked with approval on their love. What it concerns us 
to know about this early passion, is given in a letter from 
a brother of Miss Grove. " Bysshe was at that time (just 
after leaving Eton) more attached to my sister Harriet 
than I can express, and I recollect well the moonlight 
walks we four had at Strode and also at St. Irving's ; that, 
I think, was the name of the place, then the Duke of Nor- 
folk's, at Horsham." For some time after the date men- 
tioned in this letter, Shelley and Miss Grove kept up an 
active correspondence; but the views he expressed on 
speculative subjects soon began to alarm her. She con- 
sulted her mother and her father, and the engagement was 
broken off. The final separation does not seem to have 
taken place until the date of Shelley's expulsion from 
Oxford; and not the least cruel of the pangs he had to 
suffer at that period, was the loss of one to whom he had 
given his whole heart unreservedly. The memory of Miss 
Grove long continued to haunt his imagination, nor is 
there much doubt that his first unhappy marriage was 
contracted while the wound remained unhealed. The 
name of Harriet Westbrook. and something in her face 
reminded him of Harriet Grove ; it is even still uncertain 
to which Harriet the dedication of Queen Mab is ad- 
dressed. 1 

In his childhood Shelley scribbled verses with fluency 

by no means unusual in the case of forward boys ; and we 

have seen that at Si on House he greedily devoured the 

sentimental novels of the day. His favourite poets at the 

1 See Medwin, vol. i. p. 68. 



il] ETON AND OXFORD. 19 

time of -which I am now writing, were Monk Lewis and 
Southey ; his favourite books in prose were romances by- 
Mrs. Radcliffe and Godwin. He now began to yearn for 
fame and publicity. Miss Shell ey speaks of a play written 
by her brother and her sister Elizabeth, which was sent to 
Matthews the comedian, and courteously returned as unfit 
for acting. She also mentions a little volume of her own 
verses, which the boy had printed with the tell-tale name 
of "H— 11— n Sh— 11— y" on the title-page. Medwin 
gives a long account of a poem on the story of the Wan- 
dering Jew, composed by him in concert with Shelley 
during the winter of 1809 — 1810. They sent the man- 
uscript to Thomas Campbell, who returned it with the 
observation that it contained but two good lines : — 

It seemed as if an angel's sigh 

Had breathed the plaintive symphony. 

Undeterred by this adverse criticism, Shelley subsequent- 
ly offered The Wandering Jew to two publishers, Messrs. 
Ballantyne and Co. of Edinburgh, and Mr. Stockdale of 
Pall Mall ; but it remained in MS. at Edinburgh till 1831, 
when a portion was printed in Fraser's Magazine. 

Just before leaving Eton he finished his novel of 
Zastrozzi, which some critics trace to its source in Zofloya 
the Moor, perused by him at Sion House. The most as- 
tonishing fact about this incoherent medley of mad senti- 
ment is that it served to furnish forth the 40/. Eton sup- 
per already spoken of, that it was duly ushered into the 
world of letters by Messrs. Wilkie and Robinson on the 
5th of June, 1810, and that it was seriously reviewed. 
The dates of Shelley's publications now come fast and fre- 
quent. In the late summer of 1810 he introduced him- 
self to Mr. J. J. Stockdale, the then fashionable publisher 



20 SHELLEY. [chap. 

of poems and romances, at his house of business in Pall 
Mall. With characteristic impetuosity the young author 
implored assistance in a difficulty. He had commissioned 
a printer in Horsham to strike off the astounding num- 
ber of 1480 copies of a volume of poems; and he had no 
money to pay the printer's bill. Would Stockdale help 
him out of this dilemma, by taking up the quires and duly 
ushering the book into the world? Throughout his life 
Shelley exercised a wonderful fascination over the people 
with whom he came in contact, and almost always won 
his way with them as much by personal charm as by de- 
termined and impassioned will. Accordingly on this oc- 
casion Stockdale proved accommodating. The Horsham 
printer was somehow satisfied ; and on the 17th of Septem- 
ber, 1810, the little book came out with the title of Original 
Poetry, by Victor and Cazire. This volume has disappear- 
ed ; and much fruitless conjecture has been expended upon 
the question of Shelley's collaborator in his juvenile at- 
tempt. Cazire stands for some one ; probably it is meant 
to represent a woman's name, and that woman may have 
been either Elizabeth Shelley or Harriet Grove. The Orig- 
inal Poetry had only been launched a week, when Stock- 
dale discovered on a closer inspection of the book that it 
contained some verses well known to the world as the pro- 
duction of M. G. Lewis. He immediately communicated 
with Shelley, and the whole edition was suppressed — not, 
however, before about one hundred copies had passed into 
circulation. To which of the collaborators this daring act 
of petty larceny was due, we know not; but we may be 
sure that Shelley satisfied Stockdale on the point of pira- 
cy, since the publisher saw no reason to break with him. 
On the 14th of November in the same year he issued 
Shelley's second novel from his press, and entered into 



a.) ETON AND OXFOKD. 21 

negotiations with him for the publication of more poetry. 
The new romance was named St. Irvyne, or the Rosicru- 
cian. This tale, no less unreadable than Zastrozzi, and 
even more chaotic in its plan, contained a good deal of 
poetry, which has been incorporated in the most recent 
editions of Shelley's works. A certain interest attaches 
to it as the first known link between Shelley and William 
Godwin, for it was composed under the influence of the 
latter's novel, St. Leon. The title, moreover, carries us 
back to those moonlight walks with Harriet Grove alluded 
to above. Shelley's earliest attempts in literature have but 
little value for the student of poetry, except in so far as 
they illustrate the psychology of genius and its wayward 
growth. Their intrinsic merit is almost less than nothing, 
and no one could predict from their perusal the course 
which the future poet of The Cenci and Epipsychidion 
was to take. It might indeed be argued that the defects 
of his great qualities, the over-ideality, the haste, the inco- 
herence, and the want of grasp on narrative, are glaringly 
apparent in these early works. But while this is true, 
the qualities themselves are absent. A cautious critic will 
only find food in Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne for wondering 
how such flowers and fruits of genius could have lain con- 
cealed within a germ apparently so barren. There is even 
less of the real Shelley discernible in these productions, 
than of the real Byron in the Hours of Idleness. 

In the Michaelmas Term of 1810 Shelley was matricu- 
lated as a Commoner of University College, Oxford ; and 
very soon after his arrival he made the acquaintance of a 
man who was destined to play a prominent part in his 
subsequent history, and to bequeath to posterity the most 
brilliant, if not in all respects the most trustworthy, record 
of his marvellous youth. Thomas Jefferson Hogg was 



22 SHELLEY. [chap. 

unlike Shelley in temperament and tastes. His feet were 
always planted on the earth, while Shelley flew aloft to 
heaven with singing robes around him, or the mantle of 
the prophet on his shoulders. 1 Hogg had much of the 
cynic in his nature ; he was a shrewd man of the world, 
and a caustic humorist. Positive and practical, he chose 
the beaten path of life, rose to eminence as a lawyer, and 
cherished the Church and State opinions of a staunch 
Tory. Yet, though he differed so essentially from the 
divine poet, he understood the greatness of Shelley at a 
glance, and preserved for us a record of his friend's early 
days, which is incomparable for the vividness of its por- 
traiture. The pages which narrate Shelley's course of life 
at Oxford have all the charm of a romance. No novel in- 
deed is half so delightful as that picture, at once affection- 
ate and satirical, tender and humorous, extravagant and 
delicately shaded, of the student life enjoyed together for 
a few short months by the inseparable friends. To make 
extracts from a masterpiece of such consummate work- 
manship is almost painful. Future biographers of Shelley, 
writing on a scale adequate to the greatness of their sub- 
ject, will be content to lay their pens down for a season 
at this point, and let Hogg tell the tale in his own way- 
ward but inimitable fashion. I must confine myself to a 
few quotations and a barren abstract, referring my readers 
to the ever-memorable pages 48 — 286 of Hogg's first vol- 
ume, for the life that cannot be transferred to these. 

" At the commencement of Michaelmas term," says this 

1 He told Trelawny that he had been attracted to Shelley simply 
by his " rare talents as a scholar ;" and Trelawny has recorded his 
opinion that Hogg's portrait of their friend was faithful, in spite of 
a total want of sympathy with his poetic genius. This testimony is 
extremely valuable. 



ii.] ETON AND OXFORD. 23 

biographer, " that is, at the end of October, in the year 
1810, I happened one day to sit next to a freshman at 
dinner; it was his first appearance in hall. His figure 
was slight, and his aspect remarkably youthful, even at 
our table, where all were very young. He seemed thought- 
ful and absent. He ate little, and had no acquaintance 
with any one." The two young men began a conversa- 
tion, which turned upon the respective merits of German 
and Italian poetry, a subject they neither of them knew 
anything about. After dinner it was continued in Hogg's 
rooms, where Shelley soon led the talk to his favourite 
topic of science. "As I felt, in truth, but a slight inter- 
est in the subject of his conversation, I had leisure to ex- 
amine, and I may add, to admire, the appearance of my 
very extraordinary guest. It was a sum of many contra- 
dictions. His figure was slight and fragile, and yet his 
bones and joints were large and strong. He was tall, but 
he stooped so much, that he seemed of a low stature, 
His clothes were expensive, and made according to the 
most approved mode of the day ; but they were tumbled, 
rumpled, unbrushed. His gestures were abrupt, and some- 
times violent, occasionally even awkward, yet more fre- 
quently gentle and graceful. His complexion was delicate 
and almost feminine, of the purest red and white ; yet he 
was tanned and freckled by exposure to the sun, having 
passed the autumn, as he said, in shooting. His features, 
his whole face, and particularly his head, were, in fact, un- 
usually small ; yet the last appeared of a remarkable bulk, 
for his hair was long and bushy, and in fits of absence, and 
in the agonies (if I may use the word) of anxious thought, 
he often rubbed it fiercely with his hands, or passed his 
fingers quickly through his locks unconsciously, so that it 
was singularly wild and rough. In times when it was the 



24 SHELLEY. [chap. 

mode to imitate stage-coachmen as closely as possible in 
costume, and when the hair was invariably cropped, like 
that of our soldiers, this eccentricity was very striking. 
His features were not symmetrical (the mouth, perhaps, 
excepted), yet was the effect of the whole extremely pow- 
erful. They breathed an animation, a fire, an enthusiasm, 
a vivid and preternatural intelligence, that I never met 
with in any other countenance. Nor was the moral ex- 
pression less beautiful than the intellectual ; for there was 
a softness, a delicacy, a gentleness, and especially (though 
this will surprise many) that air of profound religious 
veneration, that characterizes the best works, and chiefly 
the frescoes (and into these they infused their whole 
souls), of the great masters of Florence and of Rome. I 
recognized the very peculiar expression in these wonderful 
productions long afterwards, and with a satisfaction min- 
gled with much sorrow, for it was after the decease of him 
in whose countenance I had first observed it." 

In another place Hogg gives some details which com- 
plete the impression of Shelley's personal appearance, and 
which are fully corroborated by Trelawny's recollections 
of a later date. " There were many striking contrasts in 
the character and behaviour of Shelley, and one of the 
most remarkable was a mixture, or alternation, of awk- 
wardness with agility — of the clumsy with the graceful. 
He would stumble in stepping across the floor of a draw- 
ing-room ; he would trip himself up on a smooth-shaven 
grass-plot, and he would tumble in the most inconceivable 
manner in ascending the commodious, facile, and well- 
carpeted staircase of an elegant mansion, so as to bruise 
his nose or his lip on the upper steps, or to tread upon his 
hands, and even occasionally to disturb the composure of 
a well-bred footman; on the contrary, he would often 



ii.] ETON AND OXFOKD. 25 

glide without collision through a crowded assembly, thread 
with unerring dexterity a most intricate path, or securely 
and rapidly tread the most arduous and uncertain ways." 

This word-portrait corresponds in its main details to the 
descriptions furnished by other biographers, who had the 
privilege of Shelley's friendship. His eyes were blue, un- 
fathomably dark and lustrous. His hair was brown ; but 
very early in life it became grey, while his unwrinkled face 
retained to the last a look of wonderful youth. It is ad- 
mitted on all sides that no adequate picture was ever paint- 
ed of him. Mulready is reported to have said that he was 
too beautiful to paint. And yet, although so singularly 
lovely, he owed less of his charm to regularity of feature 
or to grace of movement, than to an indescribable personal 
fascination. One further detail Hogg pointedly insists 
upon. Shelley's voice " was excruciating ; it was intolera- 
bly shrill, harsh, and discordant." This is strongly stated ; 
but, though the terms are certainly exaggerated, I believe 
that we must trust this first impression made on Shelley's 
friend. There is a considerable mass of convergent tes- 
timony to the fact that Shelley's voice was high pitched, 
and that when he became excited, he raised it to a scream. 
The epithets " shrill," " piercing," " penetrating," frequent- 
ly recur in the descriptions given of it. At the same time 
its quality seems to have been less dissonant than thrilling ; 
there is abundance of evidence to prove that he could mod- 
ulate it exquisitely in the reading of poetry, and its tone 
proved no obstacle to the persuasive charms of his eloquence 
in conversation. Like all finely tempered natures, he vi- 
brated in harmony with the subjects of his thought. Ex- 
citement made his utterance shrill and sharp. Deep feel- 
ing or the sense of beauty lowered its tone to richness ; 
but the timbre was always acute, in sympathy with his in* 
2* 



26 SHELLEY. [chap. 

tense temperament. All was of one piece in Shelley's nat- 
ure. This peculiar voice, varying from moment to mo- 
ment, and affecting different sensibilities in divers ways, 
corresponds to the high-strung passion of his life, his fine- 
drawn and ethereal fancies, and the clear vibrations of his 
palpitating verse. Such a voice, far-reaching, penetrating, 
and unearthly, befitted one who lived in rarest ether on 
the topmost heights of human thought. 

The acquaintance begun that October evening soon ri- 
pened into close friendship. Shelley and Hogg from this 
time forward spent a large part of their days and nights 
together in common studies, walks, and conversations. It 
was their habit to pass the morning, each in his own 
rooms, absorbed in private reading. At one o'clock they 
met and lunched, and then started for long rambles in the 
country. Shelley frequently carried pistols with him upon 
these occasions, and would stop to fix his father's franks 
upon convenient trees and shoot at them. The practice 
of pistol-shooting, adopted so early in his life, was after- 
wards one of his favourite amusements in the company of 
Byron. Hogg says that in his use of fire-arms he was ex- 
traordinarily careless. " How often have I lamented that 
Nature, which so rarely bestows upon the world a creature 
endowed with such marvellous talents, ungraciously ren- 
dered the gift less precious by implanting a fatal taste for 
perilous recreations, and a thoughtlessness in the pursuit 
of them, that often caused his existence from one day to 
another to seem in itself miraculous." On their return 
from these excursions the two friends, neither of whom 
cared for dining in the College Hall, drank tea and supped 
together, Shelley's rooms being generally chosen as the 
scene of their symposia. 

These rooms are described as a perfect palace of con- 



ii.] ETON AND OXFOKD. 21 

fusion — chaos on chaos heaped of chemical apparatus, 
books, electrical machines, unfinished manuscripts, and fur- 
niture worn into holes by acids. It was perilous to use 
the poet's drinking-vessels, less perchance a seven-shilling 
piece half dissolved in aqua regia should lurk at the bot- 
tom of the bowl. Handsome razors were used to cut the 
lids of wooden boxes, and valuable books served to support 
lamps or crucibles ; for in his vehement precipitation Shel- 
ley always laid violent hands on what he found convenient 
to the purpose of the moment. Here the friends talked 
and read until late in the night. Their chief studies at 
this time were in Locke and Hume and the French essay- 
ists. Shelley's bias toward metaphysical speculation was 
beginning to assert itself. He read the School Logic with 
avidity, and practised himself without intermission in dia- 
lectical discussion. Hogg observes, what is confirmed by 
other testimony, that in reasoning Shelley never lost sight 
of the essential bearings of the topic in dispute, never con- 
descended to personal or captious arguments, and was So- 
matically bent on following the dialogue wherever it might 
lead, without regard for consequences. Plato was another 
of their favourite authors ; but Hogg expressly tells us that 
they only approached the divine philosopher through the 
medium of translations. It was not until a later period 
that Shelley studied his dialogues in the original : but the 
substance of them, seen through Mdme. Dacier's version, 
acted powerfully on the poet's sympathetic intellect. In 
fact, although at this time he had adopted the conclusions 
of materialism, he was at heart all through his life an ide- 
alist. Therefore the mixture of the poet and the sage in 
Plato fascinated him. The doctrine of anamnesis, which 
offers so strange a vista to speculative reverie, by its sug- 
gestion of an earlier existence in which our knowledge was 



28 SHELLEY. [chap. 

acquired, took a strong hold upon his imagination ; he 
would stop in the streets to gaze wistfully at babies, won- 
dering whether their newly imprisoned souls were not re- 
plete with the wisdom stored up in a previous life. 

In the acquisition of knowledge he was then as ever un- 
relaxing. "No student ever read more assiduously. He 
was to be found, book in hand, at all hours; reading in 
season and out of season ; at table, in bed, and especially 
during a walk ; not only in the quiet country, and in re- 
tired paths ; not only at Oxford, in the public walks, and 
High Street, but in the most crowded thoroughfares of 
London. Nor was he less absorbed by the volume that 
was open before him, in Cheapside, in Cranbourne Alley, 
or in Bond Street, than in a lonely lane, or a secluded li- 
brary. Sometimes a vulgar fellow would attempt to insult 
or annoy the eccentric student in passing. Shelley always 
avoided the malignant interruption by stepping aside with 
his vast and quiet agility." And again : — " I never beheld 
eyes that devoured the pages more voraciously than his; 
I am convinced that two-thirds of the period of day and 
night were often employed in reading. It is no exaggera- 
tion to affirm, that out of the twenty-four hours, he fre- 
quently read sixteen. At Oxford, his diligence in this re- 
spect was exemplary, but it greatly increased afterwards, 
and I sometimes thought that he carried it to a pernicious 
excess : I am sure, at least, that I was unable to keep pace 
with him." With Shelley study was a passion, and the 
acquisition of knowledge was the entrance into a thrice- 
hallowed sanctuary. " The irreverent many cannot com- 
prehend the awe — the careless apathetic worldling cannot 
imagine the enthusiasm — nor can the tongue that attempts 
only to speak of things visible to the bodily eye, express 
the mighty emotion that inwardly agitated him, when he 



ii.] ETON AND OXFORD. 29 

approached, for the first time, a volume which he believed 
to be replete with the recondite and mystic philosophy of 
antiquity : his cheeks glowed, his eyes became bright, his 
whole frame trembled, and his entire attention was imme- 
diately swallowed up in the depths of contemplation. The 
rapid and vigorous conversion of his soul to intellect can 
only be compared with the instantaneous ignition and 
combustion, which dazzle the sight, when a bundle of dry 
reeds, or other light inflammable substance, is thrown upon 
a fire already rich with accumulated heat." 

As at Eton, so at Oxford, Shelley refused to keep the 
beaten track of prescribed studies, or to run in ordinary 
grooves of thought. The mere fact that Aristotle was 
a duty, seems to have disgusted him with the author of 
the Organon, from whom, had his works been prohibited 
to undergraduates, he would probably have been eager 
to learn much. For mathematics and jurisprudence he 
evinced a marked distaste. The common business of the 
English Parliament had no attraction for him, and he read 
few newspapers. While his mind was keenly interested 
in great political questions, he could not endure the trivial 
treatment of them in the daily press, and cared far more 
for principles than for the incidents of party warfare. 
Here again he showed that impatience of detail, and that 
audacity of self-reliant genius, which were the source of 
both his weakness and his strength. He used to speak 
with aversion of a Parliamentary career, and told Hogg 
that though this had been suggested to him, as befitting 
his position, by the Duke of Norfolk, he could never bring 
himself to mix with the rabble of the House. It is none 
the less true, however, that he entertained some vague no- 
tion of eventually succeeding to his father's seat. 

Combined with his eager intellectual activity, there was 



30 SHELLEY. [chap. 

something intermittent and fitful in the working of his 
mental faculties. Hogg, in particular, mentions one of his 
habits in a famous passage, which, since it brings the two 
friends vividly before us, may here be quoted. " I was 
enabled to continue my studies afterwards in the even- 
ing, in consequence of a very remarkable peculiarity. My 
young and energetic friend was then overcome by extreme 
drowsiness, which speedily and completely vanquished 
him; he would sleep from two to four hours, often so 
soundly that his slumbers resembled a deep lethargy; he 
lay occasionally upon the sofa, but more commonly stretch- 
ed upon the rug before a large fire, like a cat ; and his lit- 
tle round head was exposed to such a fierce heat, that I 
used to wonder how he was able to bear it. Sometimes 
I have interposed some shelter, but rarely with any perma- 
nent effect ; for the sleeper usually contrived to turn him- 
self, and to roll again into the spot where the fire glowed 
the brightest. His torpor was generally profound, but he 
would sometimes discourse incoherently for a long while 
in his sleep. At six he would suddenly compose himself, 
even in the midst of a most animated narrative, or of ear- 
nest discussion ; and he would lie buried in entire forget- 
fulness, in a sweet and mighty oblivion, until ten, when he 
would suddenly start up, and, rubbing his eyes with great 
violence, and passing his fingers swiftly through his long 
hair, would enter at once into a vehement argument, or 
begin to recite verses, either of his own composition or 
from the works of others, with a rapidity and an energy 
that were often quite painful." 

Shelley's moral qualities are described with no less en- 
thusiasm than his intellectual and physical beauty by the 
friend from whom I have already drawn so largely. Love 
was the root and basis of his nature : this love, first de- 



ii.] ETON AND OXFORD. 31 

veloped as domestic affection, next as friendship, then as 
a youth's passion, now began to shine with steady lustre 
as an all-embracing devotion to his fellow-men. There is 
something inevitably chilling in the words " benevolence" 
and " philanthropy." A disillusioned world is inclined to 
look with languid approbation on the former, and to dis- 
believe in the latter. Therefore I will not use them to 
describe that intense and glowing passion of unselfishness, 
which throughout his life led Shelley to find his strongest 
interests in the joys and sorrows of his fellow-creatures, 
which inflamed his imagination with visions of humanity 
made perfect, and which filled his days with sweet deeds 
of unnumbered charities. I will rather collect from the 
pages of his friend's biography a few passages recording 
the first impression of his character, the memory of which 
may be carried by the reader through the following brief 
record of his singular career : — 

"His speculations were as wild as the experience of 
twenty-one years has shown them to be ; but the zealous 
earnestness for the augmentation of knowledge, and the 
glowing philanthropy and boundless benevolence that 
marked them, and beamed forth in the whole deportment 
of that extraordinary boy, are not less astonishing than 
they would have been if the whole of his glorious antici- 
pations had been prophetic ; for these high qualities, at 
least, I have never found a parallel." 

( " In no individual perhaps was the moral sense ever 
more completely developed than in Shelley ; in no be- 
ing was the perception of right and of wrong more 
acute." ) 

"As his love of intellectual pursuits was vehement, and 
the vigour of his genius almost celestial, so were the pu- 
rity and sanctity of his life most conspicuous." 



32 SHELLEY. [chap. 

" I never knew any one so prone to admire as he was, 
in whom the principle of veneration was so strong." 

" I have had the happiness to associate with some of 
the best specimens of gentlemen ; but with all due defer- 
ence for those admirable persons (may my candour and 
my preference be pardoned), I can affirm that Shelley was 
almost the only example I have yet found that was never 
wanting, even in the most minute particular, of the infi- 
nite and various observances of pure, entire, and perfect 
gentility." 

" Shelley was actually offended, and indeed more indig- 
nant than would appear to be consistent with the singular 
mildness of his nature, at a coarse and awkward jest, es- 
pecially if it were immodest, or uncleanly ; in the latter 
case his anger was unbounded, and his uneasiness pre-em- 
inent ; he was, however, sometimes vehemently delighted 
by exquisite and delicate sallies, particularly with a fanci- 
ful, and perhaps somewhat fantastical facetiousness — pos- 
sibly the more because he was himself utterly incapable 
of pleasantry." 

" I never could discern in him any more than two fixed 
principles. The first was a strong irrepressible love of lib- 
erty ; of liberty in the abstract, and somewhat after the 
pattern of the ancient republics, without reference to the 
English constitution, respecting which he knew little and 
cared nothing, heeding it not at all. The second was an 
equally ardent love of toleration of all opinions, but more 
especially of religious opinions ; of toleration, complete, 
entire, universal, unlimited ; and, as a deduction and corol- 
lary from which latter principle, he felt an intense abhor- 
rence of persecution of every kind, public or private." 

The testimony in the foregoing extracts as to Shelley's 
purity and elevation of moral character is all the stronger, 



II.] ETON AND OXFORD. 33 

because it is given by a man Dot over-inclined to praise, 
and of a temperament as unlike the poet's as possible. If 
we were to look only upon this side of his portrait, we 
should indeed be almost forced to use the language of his 
most enthusiastic worshippers, and call him an archangel. 
But it must be admitted that, though so pure and gentle 
and exalted, Shelley's virtues were marred by his eccen- 
tricity, by something at times approaching madness, which 
paralyzed his efficiency by placing him in a glaringly false 
relation to some of the best men in the world around him. 
He possessed certain good qualities in excess ; for, though 
it sounds paradoxical, it is none the less true that a man 
may be too tolerant, too fond of liberty : and it was pre- 
cisely the extravagance of these virtues in Shelley which 
drove him into acts and utterances so antagonistic to so- 
ciety as to be intolerable. 

Of Shelley's poetical studies we hear but little at this 
epoch. His genius by a stretch of fancy might be com- 
pared to one of those double stars which dart blue and 
red rays of light : for it was governed by two luminaries, 
poetry and metaphysics ; and at this time the latter seems 
to have been in the ascendant. It is, however, interesting 
to learn that he read and re-read Landor's Gebir — stronger 
meat than either Southey's epics or the ghost -lyrics of 
Monk Lewis. Hogg found him one day busily engaged 
in correcting proofs of some original poems. Shelley 
asked his friend what he thought of them, and Hogg an- 
swered that it might be possible by a little alteration to 
turn them into capital burlesques. This idea took the 
young poet's fancy ; and the friends between them soon 
effected a metamorphosis in Shelley's serious verses, by 
which they became unmistakably ridiculous. Having 
achieved their purpose, they now bethought them of the 



34 SHELLEY. [chap. 

proper means of publication. Upon whom should the 
poems, a medley of tyrannicide and revolutionary raving, 
be fathered ? Peg Nicholson, a mad washerwoman, had 
recently attempted George the Third's life with a carving- 
knife. No more fitting author could be found. They 
would give their pamphlet to the world as her work, ed- 
ited by an admiring nephew. The printer appreciated the 
joke no less than the authors of it. He provided splendid 
paper and magnificent type ; and before long the book of 
nonsense was in the hands of Oxford readers. It sold for 
the high price of half-a-crown a copy ; and, what is hardly 
credible, the gownsmen received it as a genuine produc- 
tion. " It was indeed a kind of fashion to be seen read- 
ing it in public, as a mark of nice discernment, of a deli- 
cate and fastidious taste in poetry, and the best criterion 
of a choice spirit." Such was the genesis of Posthumous 
Fragments of Margaret Nicholson, edited by John Fitz 
Victor. The name of the supposititious nephew reminds 
us of Original Poems by Victor and Cazire, and raises the 
question whether the poems in that lost volume may not 
have partly furnished forth this Oxford travesty. 

Shelley's next publication, or quasi-publication, was nei- 
ther so innocent in substance nor so pleasant in its con- 
sequences. After leaving Eton, he continued the habit, 
learned from Dr. Lind, of corresponding with distinguish- 
ed persons whom he did not personally know. Thus we 
find him about this time addressing Miss Felicia Browne 
(afterwards Mrs. Hemans) and Leigh Hunt. He plied 
his correspondents with all kinds of questions; and as 
the dialectical interest was uppermost at Oxford, he now 
endeavoured to engage them in discussions on philosoph- 
ical and religious topics. We have seen that his favour- 
ite authors were Locke, Hume, and the French materialists. 



ii.] ETON AND OXFOKD. 35 

With the impulsiveness peculiar to his nature, he adopted 
the negative conclusions of a shallow nominalistic philos- 
ophy. It was a fundamental point with him to regard 
all questions, however sifted and settled by the wise of 
former ages, as still open ; and in his inordinate thirst for 
liberty, he rejoiced to be the Deicide of a pernicious the- 
ological delusion. In other words, he passed at Oxford 
by one leap from a state of indifferentism with regard 
to Christianity, into an attitude of vehement antagonism. 
With a view to securing answers to his missives, he 
printed a short abstract of Hume's and other arguments 
against the existence of a Deity, presented in a series of 
propositions, and signed with a mathematically important 
" Q. E. D." This document he forwarded to his proposed 
antagonists, expressing his inability to answer its argu- 
ments, and politely requesting them to help him. When 
it so happened that any incautious correspondents acceded 
to this appeal, Shelley fell with merciless severity upon 
their feeble and commonplace reasoning. The little pam- 
phlet of two pages was entitled The Necessity of Atheism; 
and its proposed publication, beyond the limits of private 
circulation already described, is proved by an advertise- 
ment (Feb. 9, 1811) in the Oxford University and City 
Herald. It was not, however, actually offered for sale. 

A copy of this syllabus reached a Fellow of another 
college, who made the Master of University acquainted 
with the fact. On the morning of March 25, 1811, 
Shelley was sent for to the Senior Common Room, and 
asked whether he acknowledged himself to be the author 
of the obnoxious pamphlet. On his refusal to answer 
this question, he was served with a formal sentence of ex- 
pulsion duly drawn up and sealed. The college author- 
ities have been blamed for unfair dealing in this matter. 



36 SHELLEY. [chap. 

It is urged that they ought to have proceeded by the 
legal method of calling witnesses'; and that the sentence 
was not only out of all proportion to the offence, but 
that it ought not to have been executed till persuasion 
had been tried. With regard to the former indictment, 
I do not think that a young man still in statu pupillari, 
who refused to purge himself of what he must have 
known to be a serious charge, had any reason to expect 
from his tutors the formalities of an English court of law. 
There is no doubt that the Fellows were satisfied of his 
being the real author ; else they could not have ventured 
on so summary a measure as expulsion. Their question 
was probably intended to give the culprit an occasion for 
apology, of which they foresaw he would not avail him- 
self. With regard to the second, it is true that Shel- 
ley was amenable to kindness, and that gentle and wise 
treatment from men whom he respected, might possibly 
have brought him to retract his syllabus. But it must 
be remembered that he despised the Oxford dons with 
all his heart ; and they were probably aware of this. He 
was a dexterous, impassioned reasoner, whom they little 
cared to encounter in argument on such a topic. During 
his short period of residence, moreover, he had not shown 
himself so tractable as to secure the good wishes of supe- 
riors, who prefer conformity to incommensurable genius. 
It is likely that they were not averse to getting rid of 
him as a man dangerous to the peace of their society ; 
and now they had a good occasion. Nor was it to be 
expected that the champion and apostle of Atheism — and 
Shelley was certainly both, in spite of Hogg's attempts to 
tone down the purpose of his document — should be un- 
molested in his propaganda by the aspirants to fat livings 
and ecclesiastical dignities. Real blame, however, attaches 



n.] ETON AND OXFORD. 37 

to these men : first, for their dulness to discern Shelley's 
amiable qualities ; and, secondly, for the prejudgment of 
the case implied in the immediate delivery of their sen- 
tence. Both Hogg and Shelley accused them, besides, of 
a gross brutality, which was, to say the least, unseemly on 
so serious an occasion. At the beginning of this century 
the learning and the manners of the Oxford dons were at 
a low ebb ; and the Fellows of University College acted 
harshly but not altogether unjustly, ignorantly but after 
their own kind, in this matter of Shelley's expulsion. 
JVon ragionam di lor, ma guarda e passa. Hogg, who 
stood by his friend manfully at this crisis, and dared the 
authorities to deal with him as they had dealt with Shelley, 
adding that they had just as much real proof to act upon 
in his case, and intimating his intention of returning the 
same answer as to the authorship of the pamphlet, was 
likewise expelled. The two friends left Oxford together 
by the coach on the morning of the 26th of March. 

Shelley felt his expulsion acutely. At Oxford he had 
enjoyed the opportunities of private reading which the 
University afforded in those days of sleepy studies and 
innocuous examinations. He delighted in the security of 
his " oak," and above all things he found pleasure in the 
society of his one chosen friend. He was now obliged to 
exchange these good things for the tumult and discomfort 
of London. His father, after clumsily attempting com- 
promises, had forbidden his return to Field Place. The 
whole fabric of his former life was broken up. The last 
hope of renewing his engagement with his cousin had to 
be abandoned. His pecuniary position was precarious, 
and in a short time he was destined to lose the one friend 
who had so generously shared his fate. Yet the notion 
of recovering his position as a student in one of our great 



SHELLEY. 



[chap. II. 






Universities, of softening his father's indignation, or of 
ameliorating his present circumstances by the least con- 
cession, never seems to have occurred to him. He had 
suffered in the cause of truth and liberty, and he willingly 
accepted his martyrdom for conscience' sake. 



CHAPTER III. 

LIFE IN LONDON AND FIRST MARRIAGE. 

It is of some importance at this point to trace the 
growth and analyse the substance of Shelley's atheistical 
opinions. The cardinal characteristic of his nature was an 
implacable antagonism to shams and conventions, which 
passed too easily into impatient rejection of established 
forms as worse than useless. Born in the stronghold of 
squirearchical prejudices, nursed amid the trivial platitudes 
that then passed in England for philosophy, his keen spirit 
flew to the opposite pole of thought with a recoil that 
carried him at first to inconsiderate negation. His pas- 
sionate love of liberty, his loathing for intolerance, his im- 
patience of control for self and others, and his vivid logi- 
cal sincerity, combined to make him the Quixotic cham- 
pion of extreme opinions. He was too fearless to be wise, 
too precipitate to suspend his judgment, too convinced of 
the paramount importance of iconoclasm, to mature his 
views in silence. With the unbounded audacity of youth, 
he hoped to take the fortresses of "Anarch Custom" by 
storm at the first assault. His favourite ideal was the vi- 
sion of a youth, Laon or Lionel, whose eloquence had pow- 
er to break the bonds of despotism, as the sun thaws ice 
upon an April morning. It was enough, he thought, to 
hurl the glove of defiance boldly at the tyrant's face— to 



40 SHELLEY. [chap. 

sow the Necessity of Atheism broadcast on the bench of 
Bishops, and to depict incest in bis poetry, not because be 
wished to defend it, but because society must learn to face 
the most abhorrent problems with -impartiality. Gifted 
with a touch as unerring as Ithuriel's spear for the un- 
masking of hypocrisy, he strove to lay bare the very sub- 
stance of the soul beneath the crust of dogma and the 
froth of traditional beliefs ; nor does it seem to have oc- 
curred to hirn that, while he stripped the rags and patches 
that conceal the nakedness of ordinary human nature, he 
might drag away the weft and woof of nobler thought. 
In his poet -philosopher's imagination there bloomed a 
wealth of truth and love and beauty so abounding, that 
behind the mirage he destroyed, he saw no blank, but a 
new Eternal City of the Spirit. He never doubted wheth- 
er his fellow-creatures were certain to be equally fortunate. 
Shelley had no faculty for compromise, no perception 
of the blended truths and falsehoods through which the 
mind of man must gradually win its way from the obscu- 
rity of myths into the clearness of positive knowledge, for 
ever toiling and for ever foiled, and forced to content itself 
with the increasing consciousness of limitations. Brim- 
ming over with love for men, he was deficient in sympa- 
thy with the conditions under which they actually think 
and feel. Could he but dethrone the Anarch Custom, the 
millennium, he argued, would immediately arrive ; nor did 
he stop to think how different was the fibre of his own 
soul from that of the unnumbered multitudes around him. 
In his adoration of what he recognized as living, he re- 
tained no reverence for the ossified experience of past 
ages. The principle of evolution, which forms a saving 
link between the obsolete and the organically vital, had no 
place in his logic. The spirit of the French Revolution, 



in.] LtfE IN LONDON AND FIRST MARRIAGE. 41 

uncompromising, shattering, eager to build in a day the 
structure which long centuries of growth must fashion, 
was still fresh upon him. "We who have survived the en- 
thusiasms of that epoch, who are exhausted with its pas- 
sions, and who have suffered from its reactive impulses, 
can scarcely comprehend the vivid faith and young-eyed 
joy of aspiration which sustained Shelley in his flight to- 
ward the region of impossible ideals. For he had a vital 
faith ; and this faith made the ideals he conceived seem 
possible — faith in the duty and desirability of overthrow- 
ing idols ; faith in the gospel of liberty, fraternity, equal- 
ity ; faith in the divine beauty of nature ; faith in a love 
that rules the universe ; faith in the perfectibility of man ; 
faith in the omnipresent soul, whereof our souls are atoms; 
faith in affection as the ruling and co-ordinating substance 
of morality. The man who lived by this faith was in 
no vulgar sense of the word an Atheist. When he pro- 
claimed himself to be one, he pronounced his hatred of a 
gloomy religion, which had been the instrument of kings 
and priests for the enslavement of their fellow-creatures. 
As he told his friend Trelawny, he used the word Atheism 
" to express his abhorrence of superstition ; he took it up 
as a knight took up a gauntlet, in defiance of injustice." 
But Shelley believed too much to be consistently agnostic. 
He believed so firmly and intensely in his own religion — 
a kind of passionate positivism, a creed which seemed to 
have no God because it was all God — that he felt con- 
vinced he only needed to destroy accepted figments, for 
the light which blazed around him to break through and 
flood the world with beauty. Shelley can only be called 
an Atheist, in so far as he maintained the inadequacy of 
hitherto received conceptions of the Deity, and indignant- 
ly rejected that Moloch of cruelty who is worshipped in 
3 



42 SHELLEY. [chap. 

the debased forms of Christianity. He was an Agnostic 
only in so far as he proclaimed the impossibility of solv- 
ing the insoluble, and knowing the unknowable. His clear 
and fearless utterances upon these points place him in the 
rank of intellectual heroes. But his own soul, compact of 
human faith and love, was far too religious and too san- 
guine to merit either epithet as vulgarly applied. 

The negative side of Shelley's creed had the moral 
value which attaches to all earnest conviction, plain 
speech, defiance of convention, and enthusiasm for intel- 
lectual liberty at any cost. It was marred, however, by 
extravagance, crudity, and presumption. Much that he 
would fain have destroyed because he found it custom- 
ary, was solid, true, and beneficial. Much that he thought 
it desirable to substitute, was visionary, hollow, and per- 
nicious. He lacked the touchstone of mature philoso- 
phy, whereby to separate the pinchbeck from the gold 
of social usage ; and in his intense enthusiasm he lost 
his hold on common sense, which might have saved him 
from the puerility of arrogant iconoclasm. The positive 
side of his creed remains precious, not because it was log- 
ical, or scientific, or coherent, but because it was an ideal, 
fervently felt, and penetrated with the whole life -force 
of an incomparable nature. Such ideals are needed for 
sustaining man upon his path amid the glooms and shad- 
ows of impenetrable ignorance. They form the seal and 
pledge of his spiritual dignity, reminding him that he was 
not born to live like brutes, or like the brutes to perish 
without effort. 

Fatti non foste a viver come bruti, 
Ma per seguir virtude e conoscenza. 

These criticisms apply -to the speculations of Shelley's 
earlier life, when his crusade against accepted usage was 



in.] LIFE IN LONDON AND FIRST MARRIAGE. 43 

extravagant, and his confidence in the efficacy of mere 
eloquence to change the world was overweening. The 
experience of years, however, taught him wisdom without 
damping his enthusiasm, refined the crudity of his first 
fervent speculations, and mellowed his philosophy. Had 
he lived to a ripe age, there is no saying with what clear 
and beneficent lustre might have shone that light of as- 
piration which during his turbid youth burned somewhat 
luridly, and veiled its radiance in the smoke of mere re- 
belliousness and contradiction. 

Hogg and Shelley settled in lodgings at No. 15, Poland 
Street, soon after their arrival in London. The name 
attracted Shelley : " it reminded him of Thaddeus of War- 
saw and of freedom." He was further fascinated by a 
gaudy wall-paper of vine-trellises and grapes, which adorn- 
ed the parlour; and vowed that he would stay there for 
ever. " For ever," was a word often upon Shelley's lips 
in the course of his checquered life; and yet few men 
have been subject to so many sudden changes through 
the bufferings of fortune from without and the incon- 
stancy of their own purpose, than he was. His biogra- 
pher has no little trouble to trace and note with accuracy 
his perpetual flittings and the names of his innumerable 
temporary residences. A month had not elapsed before 
Hogg left him in order to begin his own law studies at 
York; and Shelley abode "alone in the vine-trellised 
chamber, where he was to remain, a bright-eyed, restless 
fox amidst sour grapes, not, as his poetic imagination at 
first suggested, for ever, but a little while longer." 

The records of this first residence in London are 
meagre, but not unimportant. We hear of negotiations 
and interviews with Mr. Timothy Shelley, all of which 
proved unavailing. Shelley would not recede from the 



44 SHELLEY. [chap. 

position he had taken up. Nothing would induce him 
to break off his intimacy with Hogg, or to place himself 
under the tutor selected for him by his father. For 
Paley's, or as Mr. Shelley called him " Palley's," Evidences 
he expressed unbounded contempt. The breach between 
them gradually widened. Mr. Shelley at last determined 
to try the effect of cutting off supplies ; but his son only 
hardened his heart, and sustained himself by a proud 
consciousness of martyrdom. I agree with Shelley's last 
and best biographer, Mr. W. M. Rossetti, in his condemna- 
tion of the poet's behaviour as a son. Shelley did not 
treat his father with the common consideration due from 
youth to age ; and the only instances of unpardonable bad 
taste to be found in his correspondence or the notes of his 
conversation, are insulting phrases applied to a man who 
was really more unfortunate than criminal in his relations 
to this changeling from the realms of faery. It is not 
too much to say that his dislike of his father amounted 
to derangement; and certainly some of his suspicions 
with regard to him were the hallucinations of a heated 
fancy. How so just and gentle a nature was brought 
into so false a moral situation, whether by some sudden 
break-down of- confidence in childhood or by a gradually 
increasing mistrust, is an interesting but perhaps insoluble 
problem. We only know that in his early boyhood Shel- 
ley loved his father so much as to have shown unusual 
emotion during his illness on one occasion, but that, 
while at Eton, he had already become possessed by a 
dark suspicion concerning him. This is proved by the 
episode of Dr. Lind's visit during his fever. Then and 
ever afterwards he expected monstrous treatment at his 
hands, although the elder gentleman was nothing w^orse 
than a muddle-headed squire. It has more than once 



in.] LITE IX LOXDOX AXD FIRST MARRIAGE. 45 

occurred to me that this fever may have been a turning 
point in his history, and that a delusion, engendered by 
delirium, may have fixed itself upon his mind, owing to 
some imperfection in the process of recovery. But the 
theory is too speculative and unsupported by proof to be 
more than passingly alluded to. 

At this time Shelley found it difficult to pay his lodg- 
ings and buy food. It is said that his sisters saved their 
pocket-money to support him : and we know that he paid 
them frequent visits at their school on Clapham Common. 
It was here that his characteristic hatred of tyranny dis- 
played itself on two occasions. " One day," writes Miss 
Hellen Shelley, "his ire was greatly excited at a black 
mark hung round one of our throats, as a penalty for some 
small misdemeanour. He expressed great disapprobation, 
more of the system than that one of his sisters should be 
so punished. Another time he found me, I think, in an 
iron collar, which certainly was a dreadful instrument of 
torture in my opinion. It was not worn as a punishment, 
but because I poked; but Bysshe declared it would make 
me grow crooked, and ought to be discontinued immedi- 
ately." The acquaintance which he now made with one 
of his sister's school friends was destined to lead to most 
important results. 1 Harriet Westbrook was a girl of six- 
teen years, remarkably good-looking, with a brilliant pink 
and white complexion, beautiful brown hair, a pleasant 
voice, and a cheerful temper. She was the daughter of a 
man who kept a coffee-house in Mount Street, nick-named 
"Jew" Westbrook, because of his appearance. She had 
an elder sister, called Eliza, dark of complexion, and gaunt 
of figure, with the abundant hair that plays so prominent 
a part in Hogg's relentless portrait. Eliza, being nearly 

1 It is probable that he saw her for the first time in January, 1811. 



46 SHELLEY. [chap. 

twice as old as Harriet, stood in the relation of a mother 
to her. Both of these young ladies, and the "Jew" their 
father, welcomed Shelley with distinguished kindness. 
Though he was penniless for the nonce, exiled from his 
home, and under the ban of his family's displeasure, he 
was still the heir' to a large landed fortune and a baronetcy. 
It was not to be expected that the coffee-house people 
should look upon him with disfavour. 

Shelley paid Harriet frequent visits both at Mrs. Fen- 
ning's school and at Mount Street, and soon began a cor- 
respondence with her, hoping, as he expressly stated in a 
letter of a later date, by converting her to his theories, to 
add his sister and her " to the list of the good, the disin- 
terested, the free." At first she seems to have been horri- 
fied at the opinions he expressed ; but in this case at least 
he did not overrate the powers of eloquence. With all 
the earnestness of an evangelist, he preached his gospel of 
freeth ought or atheism, and had the satisfaction of form- 
ing his young pupil to his views. He does not seem to 
have felt any serious inclination for Harriet ; but in the 
absence of other friends, he gladly availed himself of her 
society. Gradually she became more interesting to him, 
when he heard mysterious accounts of suffering at home 
and tyranny at school. This was enough to rouse in Shel- 
ley the spirit of Quixotic championship, if not to sow the 
seeds of love. What Harriet's ill-treatment really was, no 
one has been able to discover ; yet she used to affirm that 
her life at this time was so irksome that she contemplated 
suicide. 

During the summer of 1811, Shelley's movements were 
more than usually erratic, and his mind was in a state of 
extraordinary restlessness. In the month of May, a kind 
of accommodation was come to with his father. He re- 



in.] LIFE IN LONDON AND FIRST MARRIAGE. 47 

ceived permission to revisit Field Place, and had an allow- 
ance made him of 200/. a year. His uncle, Captain Pil- 
fold of Cuckfield, was instrumental in effecting this partial 
reconciliation. Shelley spent some time at his uncle's 
country house, oscillating between London, Cuckfield, and 
Field Place, with characteristic rapidity, and paying one 
flying visit to his cousin Grove at Cwm Elan, near Rhaya- 
der, in North Wales. This visit is worth mention, since 
he now for the first time saw the scenery of waterfalls 
and mountains. He was, however, too much preoccupied 
to take much interest in nature. He was divided between 
his old affection for Miss Grove, his new but somewhat 
languid interest in Harriet, and a dearly cherished scheme 
for bringing about a marriage between his sister Elizabeth 
and his friend Hogg. The letters written to Hogg at this 
period (vol. i. pp. 387 — 418), are exceedingly important 
and interesting, revealing as they do the perturbation of 
his feelings and the almost morbid excitement of his mind. 
But they are unluckily so badly edited, whether designedly 
or by accident, that it would be dangerous to draw minute 
conclusions from them. As they stand, they raise injuri- 
ous suspicions, which can only be set at rest by a proper 
assignment of dates and explanations. 

Meanwhile his destiny was shaping itself with a rapidity 
that plunged him suddenly into decisive and irrevocable 
action. It is of the greatest moment to ascertain precisely 
what his feelings were during this summer with regard to 
Harriet. Hogg has printed two letters in immediate jux- 
taposition : the first without date, the second with the 
post-mark of Rhayader. Shelley ends the first epistle 
thus: "Your jokes on Harriet Westbrook amuse me : it 
is a common error for people to fancy others in their own 
situation, but if I know anything about love, I am not in 



48 SHELLEY. [chap. 

love. I have heard from the Westbrooks, both of whom 
I highly esteem." He begins the second with these words : 
" You will perhaps see me before you can answer this ; 
perhaps not ; heaven knows ! I shall certainly come to 
York, but Harriet Westbrook will decide whether now 
or in three weeks. Her father has persecuted her in a 
most horrible way, by endeavouring to compel her to go to 
school. She asked my advice : resistance was the answer, 
at the same time that I essayed to mollify Mr. W. in vain ! 
And in consequence of my advice she has thrown herself 
upon my protection. I set oil for London on Monday. 
How flattering a distinction ! — I am thinking of ten mill- 
ion things at once. "What have I said ? I declare, quite 
ludicrous. I advised her to resist. She wrote to say that 
resistance was useless, but that she would fly with me, and 
threw herself upon my protection. We shall have 200£. a 
year ; when we find it run short, we must live, I suppose, 
upon love ! Gratitude and admiration, all demand that I 
should love her for ever. We shall see you at York. I 
will ^Jiear your arguments for matrimonialism, by which 
I am now almost convinced. I can get lodgings at York, 
I suppose. Direct to me at Graham's, 18, Sackville 
Street, Piccadilly." From a letter recently published by 
Mr. W. M. Rossetti (the University Magazine, Feb., 1878), 
we further learn that Harriet, having fallen violently in 
love with her preceptor, had avowed her passion and flung 
herself into his arms. 

It is clear from these documents, first, that Shelley was 
not deeply in love with Harriet when he eloped with her ; 
secondly, that he was not prepared for the step ; thirdly, 
that she induced him to take it ; and fourthly, that he 
took it under a strong impression of her having been ill- 
treated. She had appealed to his most powerful passion, 



in.] LIFE IN LONDON AND FIRST MARRIAGE. 49 

the hatred of tyranny. She had excited his admiration by 
setting- conventions at defiance, and showing her readiness 
to be his mistress. Her confidence called forth his grati- 
tude. Her choice of him for a protector flattered him : 
and, moreover, she had acted on his advice to carry resist- 
ance a outrance. There were many good Shelley an rea- 
sons why he should elope with Harriet ; but among them 
all I do not find that spontaneous and unsophisticated 
feeling, which is the substance of enduring love. 

In the same series of letters, so incoherently jumbled 
together by Hogg's carelessness or caprice, Shelley more 
than once expresses the utmost horror of matrimony. Yet 
we now find him upon the verge of contracting marriage 
with a woman whom he did not passionately love, and 
who had offered herself unreservedly to him. It is worth 
pausing to observe that even Shelley, fearless and uncom- 
promising as he was in conduct, could not at this crisis 
practise the principles he so eloquently impressed on oth- 
ers. Yet the point of weakness was honourable. It lay 
in his respect for women in general, and in his tender 
chivalry for the one woman who had cast herself upon 
his generosity. 1 

" My unfortunate friend Harriet," he writes under date 
Aug. 15, 1811, from London, whither he had hurried to 
arrange the affairs of his elopement, " is yet undecided ; 
not with respect to me, but to herself. How much, my 
dear friend, have I to tell you. In my leisure moments 
for thought, which since I wrote have been few, I have 
considered the important point on which you reprobated 
my hasty decision. The ties of love and honour are 
doubtless of sufficient strength to bind congenial souls — 

1 See Shelley's third letter to Godwin (Hogg, ii. p. 63) for another 
defence of his conduct. " We agreed," &c. 
3* 



50 SHELLEY. [chap. 

they are doubtless indissoluble, but by the brutish force of 
power ; they are delicate and satisfactory. Yet the argu- 
ments of impracticability, and what is even worse, the dis- 
proportionate sacrifice which the female is called upon to 
make — these arguments, which you have urged in a man- 
ner immediately irresistible, I cannot withstand. Not that 
I suppose it to be likely that i" shall directly be called 
upon to evince my attachment to either theory. I am be- 
come a perfect convert to matrimony, not from tempo- 
rizing, but from your arguments ; nor, much as I wish to 
emulate your virtues and liken myself to you, do I regret 
the prejudices of anti-matrimonialism from your example 
or assertion. No. The one argument, which you have 
urged so often with so much energy ; the sacrifice made 
by the woman, so disproportioned to any which the man 
can give — this alone may exculpate me, were it a fault, 
from uninquiring submission to your superior intellect." 

Whether Shelley from his own peculiar point of view 
was morally justified in twice marrying, is a question of 
casuistry which has often haunted me. The reasons he 
alleged in extenuation of his conduct with regard to Har- 
riet, prove the goodness of his heart, his openness to argu- 
ment, and the delicacy of his unselfishness. But they do 
not square with his expressed code of conduct ; nor is it 
easy to understand how, having found it needful to sub- 
mit to custom, for his partner's sake, he should have gone 
on denouncing an institution which he recognized in his 
own practice. The conclusion seems to be that, though 
he despised accepted usage, and would fain have fashion- 
ed the w T orld afresh to suit his heart's desire, the instincts 
of a loyal gentleman and his practical good sense were 
stronger than his theories. 

A letter from Shelley's cousin, Mr. C. H. Grove, gives 



in.] LIFE IN LONDON AND FIRST MARRIAGE. 51 

the details of Harriet's elopement. " When Bysshe finally 
came to town to elope with Miss Westbrook, he came as 
usual to Lincoln's Inn Fields, and I was his companion on 
his visits to her, and finally accompanied them early one 
morning — I forget now the month, or the date, but it 
might have been September — in a hackney coach to the 
Green Dragon, in Gracechurch Street, where we remained 
all day, till the hour when the mail-coaches start, when 
they departed in the northern mail for York." From 
York the young couple made their way at once to Edin- 
burgh, where they were married according to the formali- 
ties of the Scotch law. 

Shelley had now committed that greatest of social 
crimes in his father's eyes — a mesalliance. Supplies and 
communications were at once cut off from the prodigal ; 
and it appears that Harriet and he were mainly dependent 
upon the generosity of Captain Pilfold for subsistence. 
Even Jew Westbrook, much as he may have rejoiced at 
seeing his daughter wedded to the heir of several thou- 
sands a year, buttoned up his pockets, either because he 
thought it well to play the part of an injured parent, or 
because he was not certain about Shelley's expectations. 
He afterwards made the Shelleys an allowance of 200/. a 
year, and early in 1812 Shelley says that he is in receipt 
of twice that income. Whence we may conclude that 
both fathers before long relented to the extent of the sum 
above mentioned. 

In spite of temporary impecuniosity, the young people 
lived happily enough in excellent lodgings in George 
Street. Hogg, who joined them early in September, has 
drawn a lively picture of their domesticity. Much of the 
day was spent in reading aloud ; for Harriet, who had a 
fine voice and excellent lungs, was never happy unless she 



52 SHELLEY. [chap. 

was allowed to read and comment on her favourite authors. 
Shelley sometimes fell asleep during the performance of 
these rites ; but when he woke refreshed with slumber, he 
was no less ready than at Oxford to support philosophi- 
cal paradoxes with impassioned and persuasive eloquence. 
He began to teach Harriet Latin, set her to work upon 
the translation of a French story by Madame Cottin, and 
for his own part executed a version of one of Bullion's 
treatises. The sitting-room was full of books. It was 
one of Shelley's peculiarities to buy books wherever he 
went, regardless of their volume or their cost. These he 
was w r ont to leave behind, when the moment arrived for 
a sudden departure from his temporary abode; so that, 
as Hogg remarks, a fine library might have been formed 
from the waifs and strays of his collections scattered over 
the three kingdoms. This quiet course of life was diver- 
sified by short rambles in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh, 
and by many episodes related with Hogg's caustic humour. 
On the whole, the impression left upon the reader's mind 
is that Shelley and Harriet were very happy together at 
this period, and that Harriet was a charming and sweet- 
tempered girl, somewhat too much given to the study of 
trite ethics, and slightly deficient in sensibility, but other- 
wise a fit and soothing companion for the poet. 

They were not, however, content to remain in Edin- 
burgh. Hogg was obliged to leave that city, in order to 
resume his law studies at York, and Shelley's programme 
of life at this period imperatively required the society of 
his chosen comrade. It was therefore decided that the 
three friends should settle at York, to remain "for ever" 
in each other's company. They started in a post-chaise, 
the good Harriet reading aloud novels by the now forgot- 
ten Holcroft with untiring energy, to charm the tedium 



iil] LIFE IN LONDON AND FIRST MARRIAGE. 53 

of the journey. At York more than one cloud obscured 
their triune felicity. In the first place they were unfort- 
unate in their choice of lodgings. In the second Shelley 
found himself obliged to take an expensive journey to 
London, in the fruitless attempt to come to some terms 
with his father's lawyer, Mr. "Whitton. Mr. Timothy Shel- 
ley was anxious to bind his erratic son down to a settle- 
ment of the estates, which, on his own death, would pass 
into the poet's absolute control. He suggested numerous 
arrangements; and not long after the date of Shelley's 
residence in York, he proposed to make him an immediate 
allowance of 2000/., if Shelley would but consent to entail 
the land on his heirs male. This offer was indignantly 
refused. Shelley recognized the truth that property is a 
trust far more than a possession, and would do nothing to 
tie up so much command over labour, such incalculable 
potentialities of social good or evil, for an unborn being of 
whose opinions he knew nothing. This is only one among 
many instances of his readiness to sacrifice ease, comfort, 
nay, the bare necessities of life, for principle. 

On his return to York, Shelley found a new inmate es- 
tablished in their lodgings. The incomparable Eliza, who 
was henceforth doomed to guide his destinies to an ob- 
scure catastrophe, had arrived from London. Harriet be- 
lieved her sister to be a paragon of beauty, good sense, 
and propriety. She obeyed her elder sister like a mother ; 
never questioned her wisdom ; and foolishly allowed her 
to interpose between herself and her husband. Hogg had 
been told before her first appearance in the friendly circle 
that Eliza was " beautiful, exquisitely beautiful ; an ele- 
gant figure, full of grace ; her face was lovely, — dark, bright 
eyes ; jet-black hair, glossy ; a crop upon which she be- 
stowed the care it merited, — almost all her time ; and she 



54 SHELLEY. [chap. 

was so sensible, so amiable, so good!" Now let us listen 
to the account he has himself transmitted of this woman, 
whom certainly he did not love, and to whom poor Shelley 
had i fterwards but little reason to feel gratitude. " She 
was older than I had expected, and she looked much older 
than she was. The lovely face was seamed with the small- 
pox, and of a dead white, as faces so much marked and 
scarred commonly are ; as white indeed as a mass of boil- 
ed rice, but of a dingy hue, like rice boiled in dirty water. 
The eyes were dark, but dull, and without meaning; the 
hair was black and glossy, but coarse ; and there was the 
admired crop — a long crop, much like the tail of a horse 
— a switch tail. The fine figure was meagre, prim, and 
constrained. The beauty, the grace, and the elegance ex- 
isted, no doubt, in their utmost perfection, but only in the 
imagination of her partial young sister. Her father, as 
Harriet told me, was familiarly called 'Jew Westbrook,' 
and Eliza greatly resembled one of the dark-eyed daugh- 
ters of Judah." 

This portrait is drawn, no doubt, with an unfriendly 
hand; and, in Hogg's biography, each of its sarcastic 
touches is sustained with merciless reiteration, whenever 
the mention of Eliza's name is necessary. We hear, more- 
over, how she taught the blooming Harriet to fancy that 
she was the victim of her nerves, how she checked her 
favourite studies, and how she ruled the household by 
continual reference to a Mrs. Grundy of her earlier expe- 
rience. " What would Miss Warne say ?" was as often on 
her lips, if we may credit Hogg, as the brush and comb 
were in her hands. 

The intrusion of Eliza disturbed the harmony of Shel- 
ley's circle ; but it is possible that there were deeper rea- 
sons for the abrupt departure which he made from York 



m.] LITE IN LONDON AND FIKST MARRIAGE. 55 

with his wife and her sister in November, 1811. One of 
his biographers asserts with categorical precision that Shel- 
ley had good cause to resent Hogg's undue familiarity with 
Harriet, and refers to a curious composition, published by 
Hogg as a continuation of Goethe's Werther, but believed 
by Mr. McCarthy to have been a letter from the poet to 
his friend, in confirmation of his opinion. 1 However this 
may be, the precipitation with which the Shelleys quitted 
York, scarcely giving Hogg notice of their resolution, is in- 
sufficiently accounted for in his biography. 

The destination of the travellers was Keswick. Here 
they engaged lodgings for a time, and then moved into a 
furnished house. Probably Shelley was attracted to the 
lake country as much by the celebrated men who lived 
there, as by the beauty of its scenery, and the cheapness 
of its accommodation. He had long entertained an ad- 
miration for Southey's poetry, and was now beginning to 
study Wordsworth and Coleridge. But if he hoped for 
much companionship with the literary lions of the lakes, 
he was disappointed. Coleridge was absent, and missed 
making his acquaintance — a circumstance he afterwards 
regretted, saying that he could have been more useful to 
the young poet and metaphysician than Southey. De 
Quincey, though he writes ambiguously upon this point, 
does not seem to have met Shelley. Wordsworth paid 
him no attention ; and though he saw a good deal of 
Southey, this intimacy changed Shelley's early liking for 
the man and poet into absolute contempt. It was not 
likely that the cold methodical student, the mechanical 
versifier, and the political turncoat, who had outlived all 
his earlier illusions, should retain the good-will of such an 
Ariel as Shelley, in whose brain Queen Mob was already 
1 McCarthy's Shelley's Early Life, p. 117. 



56 SHELLEY. [chap. 

simmering. Life at Keswick began to be monotonous. 
It was, however, enlivened by a visit to the Duke of Nor- 
folk's seat, Greystoke. Shelley spent his last guinea on 
the trip ; but though the ladies of his family enjoyed the 
honour of some days passed in ducal hospitalities, the visit 
was not fruitful of results. The Duke at this time kindly 
did his best, but without success, to bring about a recon- 
ciliation between his old friend, the member for Horsham, 
and his rebellious son. 

Another important incident of the Keswick residence 
was Shelley's letter to William Godwin, whose work on 
Political Justice he had studied with unbounded admira- 
tion. He never spoke of this book without respect in 
after-life, affirming that the perusal of it had turned his 
attention from romances to questions of public utility. 
The earliest letter dated to Godwin from Keswick, January 
3, 1812, is in many respects remarkable, and not the least 
so as a specimen of self-delineation. He entreats Godwin 
to become his guide, philosopher, and friend, urging that 
"if desire for universal happiness has any claim upon your 
preference," if persecution and injustice suffered in the 
cause of philanthropy and truth may commend a young 
man to William Godwin's regard, he is not unworthy of 
this honour. We who have learned to know the flawless 
purity of Shelley's aspirations, can refrain from smiling at 
the big generalities of this epistle. Words which to men 
made callous by long contact with the world, ring false 
and wake suspicion, were for Shelley but the natural ex- 
pression of his most abiding mood. Yet Godwin may 
be pardoned if he wished to know more in detail of the 
youth, who sought to cast himself upon his care in all the 
panoply of phrases about philanthropy and universal hap- 
piness. Shelley's second letter contains an extraordinary 



in.] LIFE IN LONDON AND FIRST MARRIAGE. 51 

mixture of truth willingly communicated, and of curious 
romance, illustrating his tendency to colour facts with the 
hallucinations of an ardent fancy. Of his sincerity there 
is, I think, no doubt. He really meant what he wrote ; 
and yet we have no reason to believe the statement that 
he was twice expelled from Eton for disseminating the 
doctrines of Political Justice, or that his father wished to 
drive him by poverty to accept a commission in some dis- 
tant regiment, in order that he might prosecute the Neces- 
sity of Atheism in his absence, procure a sentence of out- 
lawry, and so convey the family estates to his younger 
brother. The embroidery of bare fact with a tissue of 
imagination was a peculiarity of Shelley's mind ; and this 
letter may be used as a key for the explanation of many 
strange occurrences in his biography. What he tells God- 
win about his want of love for his father, and his inabili- 
ty to learn from the tutors imposed upon him at Eton and 
Oxford, represents the simple truth. Only from teachers 
chosen by himself, and recognized as his superiors by his 
own deliberate judgment, can he receive instruction. To 
Godwin he resigns himself with the implicit confidence of 
admiration. Godwin was greatly struck with this letter. 
Indeed, he must have been " or God or beast," like the 
insensible man in Aristotle's Ethics, if he could have re- 
sisted the devotion of so splendid and high-spirited a 
nature, poured forth in language at once so vehement 
and so convincingly sincere. He accepted the responsi- 
ble post of Shelley's Mentor; and thus began a connex- 
ion which proved not only a source of moral support and 
intellectual guidance to the poet, but was also destined to 
end in a closer personal tie between the two illustrious 
men. * 

In his second letter Shelley told Godwin that he was 



58 SHELLEY. [chap. 

then engaged in writing "An inquiry into the causes of 
the failure of the French Revolution to benefit mankind," 
adding, " My plan is that of resolving to lose no opportu- 
nity to disseminate truth and happiness." Godwin sensi- 
bly replied that Shelley was too young to set himself up 
as a teacher and apostle : but his pupil did not take the 
hint. A third letter (Jan. 16, 1812) contains this start- 
ling announcement : "In a few days we set off to Dublin. 
I do not know exactly where, but a letter addressed to 
Keswick will find me. Our journey has been settled some 
time. We go principally to forward as much as we can 
the Catholic Emancipation." In a fourth letter (Jan. 28, 
1812) he informs Godwin that he has already prepared an 
address to the Catholics of Ireland, and combats the dis- 
suasions of his counsellor with ingenious arguments to 
prove that his contemplated expedition can do no harm, 
and may be fruitful of great good. 

It appears that for some time past Shelley had devoted 
his attention to Irish politics. The persecution of Mr. 
Peter Finnerty, an Irish journalist and editor of The Press 
newspaper, who had been sentenced to eighteen months' 
imprisonment in Lincoln jail (between Feb. V, 1811, and 
Aug. 7, 1812) for plain speech about Lord Castlereagh, 
roused his hottest indignation. He published a poem, as 
yet unrecovered, for his benefit ; the proceeds of the sale 
amounting, it is said, to nearly one hundred pounds. 1 The 
young enthusiast, who was attempting a philosophic study 
of the French Revolution, whose heart was glowing with 
universal philanthropy, and who burned to disseminate 
truth and happiness, judged that Ireland would be a fit- 
ting field for making a first experiment in practical poli- 
tics. Armed with the MS. of his Address to the Irish 



McCarthy, p. 255. 



in.] LIFE IN LONDON AND FIRST MARRIAGE. 59 

People? he set sail with Harriet and Eliza on the 3rd of 
February from Whitehaven. They touched the Isle of 
Man ; and after a very stormy passage, which drove them 
to the north coast of Ireland, and forced them to complete 
their journey by land, the party reached Dublin travel- 
worn, but with unabated spirit, on the 12th. Harriet 
shared her husband's philanthropical enthusiasm. " My 
wife," wrote Shelley to Godwin, " is the partner of my 
thoughts and feelings." Indeed, there is abundant proof 
in both his letters and hers, about this period, that they 
felt and worked together. Miss Westbrook, meantime, 
ruled the household ; " Eliza keeps our common stock of 
money for safety in some nook or corner of her dress, but 
we are not dependent on her, although she gives it out as 
we want it." This master-touch of unconscious delinea- 
tion tells us all we need to know about the domestic party 
now established in 7, Lower Sackville Street. Before a 
week had passed, the Address to the Irish People had 
been printed. Shelley and Harriet immediately engaged 
their whole energies in the task of distribution. It w^as 
advertised for sale ; but that alone seemed insufficient. 
On the 27th of February Shelley w r rote to a friend in 
England : " I have already sent 400 of my Irish pam- 
phlets into the world, and they have excited a sensation 
of wonder in Dublin. Eleven hundred yet remain for dis- 
tribution. Copies have been sent to sixty public-houses. 
.... Expectation is on the tiptoe. I send a man out ev- 
ery day to distribute copies, with instructions where and 
how to give them. His account corresponds with the 
multitudes of people who possess them. I stand at the 
balcony of our window and watch till I see a man who 
looks likely. I throw a book to him." 

1 It was published in Dublin. See reprint in McCarthy, p. 179. 



60 SHELLEY. [chap. 

A postscript to this letter lets us see the propaganda 
from Harriet's point of view. "I am sure you would 
laugh were you to see us give the pamphlets. We throw 
them out of window, and give them to men that we pass 
in the streets. For myself, I am ready to die of laughter 
when it is done, and Percy looks so grave. Yesterday he 
put one into a woman's hood of a cloak." 

The purpose of this address was to rouse the Irish peo- 
ple to a sense of their real misery, to point out that Cath- 
olic Emancipation and a Repeal of the Union Act were 
the only radical remedies for their wrongs, and to teach 
them the spirit in which they should attempt a revolution. 
On the last point Shelley felt intensely. The whole ad- 
dress aims at the inculcation of a noble moral temper, tol- 
erant, peaceful, resolute, rational, and self-denying. Con- 
sidered as a treatise on the principles which should gov- 
ern patriots during a great national crisis, the document is 
admirable : and if the inhabitants of Dublin had been a 
population of Shelleys, its effect might have been perma- 
nent and overwhelming. The mistake lay in supposing 
that a people whom the poet himself described as " of 
scarcely greater elevation in the scale of intellectual being 
than the oyster," were qualified to take the remedy of 
their grievances into their own hands, or were amenable to 
such sound reasoning as he poured forth. He told God- 
win that he had " wilfully vulgarized the language of this 
pamphlet, in order to reduce the remarks it contains to 
the taste and comprehension of the Irish peasantry." A 
few extracts will enable the reader to judge how far he 
had succeeded in this aim. I select such as seem to me 
most valuable for the light they throw upon his own opin- 
ions. "All religions are good which make men good; 
and the way that a person ought to prove that his method 



in.] LIFE IN LONDON AND FIRST MARRIAGE. 61 

of worshipping God is best, is for himself to be better than 
all other men." " A Protestant is my brother, and a Cath- 
olic is my brother." " Do not inquire if a man be a her- 
etic, if he be a Quaker, a Jew, or a heathen ; but if he be a 
virtuous man, if he loves liberty and truth, if he wish the 
happiness and peace of human kind. If a man be ever so 
much a believer and love not these things, he is a heart- 
less hypocrite, a rascal, and a knave." " It is not a merit 
to tolerate, but it is a crime to be intolerant." "Any thing- 
short of unlimited toleration and complete charity with all 
men, on which you will recollect that Jesus Christ princi- 
pally insisted, is wrong." " Be calm, mild, deliberate, pa- 
tient Think and talk and discuss Be free and 

be happy, but first be wise and good." Proceeding to rec- 
ommend the formation of associations, he condemns secret 
and violent societies ; " Be fair, open, and you will be ter- 
rible to your enemies." " Habits of Sobriety, Regular- 
ity, and Thought must be entered into and firmly re- 
solved upon." Then follow precepts, which Shelley no 
doubt regarded as practical, for the purification of private 
morals, and the regulation of public discussion by the 
masses whom he elsewhere recognized as " thousands hud- 
dled together, one mass of animated filth." 

The foregoing extracts show that Shelley was in no 
sense an inflammatory demagogue; however visionary 
may have been the hopes he indulged, he based those 
hopes upon the still more Utopian foundation of a sudden 
ethical reform, and preached a revolution without blood- 
shed. We find in them, moreover, the germs of The Re- 
volt of Islam, where the hero plays the part successfully 
in fiction, which the poet had attempted without appre- 
ciable result in practice at Dublin. The same principles 
guided Shelley at a still later period. When he wrote his 



62 SHELLEY. [chap. 

Masque of Anarchy, he bade the people of England to as- 
semble by thousands, strong in the truth and justice of 
their cause, invincible in peaceful opposition to force. 

While he was sowing his Address broadcast in the 
streets of Dublin, Shelley was engaged in printing a sec- 
ond pamphlet on the subject of Catholic Emancipation. 
It was entitled Proposals for an Association, and advo- 
cated in serious and temperate phrase the formation of a 
vast society, binding all the Catholic patriots of Ireland 
together, for the recovery of their rights. In estimating 
Shelley's political sagacity, it must be remembered that 
Catholic Emancipation has since his day been brought 
about by the very measure he proposed and under the 
conditions he foresaw. Speaking of the English Govern- 
ment in his Address, he used these simple phrases : — " It 
wants altering and mending. It will be mended, and a 
reform of English Government will produce good to the 
Irish." These sentences were prophetic ; and perhaps 
they are destined to be even more so. 

With a view to presenting at one glance Shelley's posi- 
tion as a practical politician, I shall anticipate the course 
of a few years, and compare his Irish pamphlets with an 
essay published in 181V, under the title of A Proposal 
for putting Reform to the Vote throughout the Kingdom. 
He saw that the House of Commons did not represent 
the country ; and acting upon his principle that govern- 
ment is the servant of the governed, he sought means for 
ascertaining the real will of the nation with regard to its 
Parliament, and for bringing the collective opinion of the 
population to bear upon its rulers. The plan proposed 
was that a huge network of committees should be formed, 
and that by their means every individual man should be 
canvassed. We find here the same method of advancing 



in.] LIFE IN LONDON AND FIRST MARRIAGE. 63 

reform by peaceable associations as in Ireland. How 
moderate were his own opinions with regard to the 
franchise, is proved by the following sentence : — " With 
respect to Universal Suffrage, I confess I consider its 
adoption, in the present unprepared state of public knowl- 
edge and feeling, a measure fraught with peril. I think 
that none but those who register their names as paying a 
certain small sum in direct taxes ought at present to send 
members to Parliament." As in the ease of Ireland, so 
in that of England, subsequent events have shown that 
Shelley's hopes were not exaggerated. 

AYhile the Shelleys were in Dublin, a meeting of the 
Irish Catholics was announced for the evening of Feb. 28. 
It was held in Fishamble Street Theatre ; and here Shel- 
ley made his debut as an orator. He spoke for about 
an hour ; and his speech was, on the whole, well received, 
though it raised some hisses at the beginning by his 
remarks upon Roman Catholicism. There is no proof 
that Shelley, though eloquent in conversation, was a pow- 
erful public speaker. The somewhat conflicting accounts 
Ave have received of this, his maiden effort, tend to the 
impression that he failed to carry his audience with him. 
The dissemination of his pamphlets had, however, raised 
considerable interest in his favour ; and he was welcomed 
by the press as an Englishman of birth and fortune, who 
wished well to the Irish cause. His youth told somewhat 
against him. It was difficult to take the strong words of 
the beardless boy at their real value ; and as though to 
aggravate this drawback, his Irish servant, Daniel Hill, an 
efficient agent in the dissemination of the Address, af- 
firmed that his master was fifteen — four years less than 
his real age. 

In Dublin Shelley made acquaintance with Curran, 



64 SHELLEY. [chap. 

whose jokes and dirty stories he could not appreciate, 
and with a Mr. Lawless, who began a history of the Irish 
people in concert with the young philosopher. We also 
obtain, from one of Harriet's letters, a somewhat humor- 
ous peep at another of their friends, a patriotic Mrs. 
Nugent, who supported herself by working in a furrier's 
shop, and who is described as " sitting in the room now, 
and talking to Percy about Virtue." After less than two 
months' experience of his Irish propaganda, Shelley came 
to the conclusion that he " had done all that he could." 
The population of Dublin had not risen to the appeal of 
their Laon with the rapidity he hoped for; and accord- 
ingly upon the Ttb. of April he once more embarked with 
his family for Holyhead. In after-days he used to hint 
that the police had given him warning that it would be 
well for him to leave Dublin ; but, though the danger of 
a prosecution was not wholly visionary, this intimation 
does not seem to have been made. Before he quitted 
Ireland, however, he despatched a box containing the re- 
maining copies of his Address and Proposals, together 
with the recently printed edition of another manifesto, 
called a Declaration of Rights, to a friend in Sussex. 
This box was delayed at the Holyhead custom-house, and 
opened. Its contents gave serious anxiety to the Sur- 
veyor of Customs, who communicated the astonishing dis- 
covery through the proper official channels to the govern- 
ment. After some correspondence, the authorities decided 
to take no steps against Shelley, and the box was for- 
warded to its destination. 

The friend in question was a Miss Eliza Hitchener, of 
Hurstpierpoint, who kept a sort of school, and who had 
attracted Shelley's favourable notice by her advanced po- 
litical and religious opinions. He does not seem to have 



iil] LIFE IN LONDON AND FIRST MARRIAGE. 65 

inade her personal acquaintance; but some of his most 
interesting letters from Ireland are addressed to her. How 
recklessly he entered into serious entanglements with peo- 
ple whom he had not learned to know, may be gathered 
from these extracts : — " We will meet you in Wales, and 
never part again. It will not do. In compliance with 
Harriet's earnest solicitations, I entreated you instantly to 
come and join our circle, resign your school, all, everything 
for us and the Irish cause." "I ought to count myself 
a favoured mortal with such a wife and such a friend." 
Harriet addressed this lady as " Portia ;" and it is an un- 
doubted fact that soon after their return to England, Miss 
Hitchener formed one of their permanent family circle. 
Her entrance into it and her exit from it at no very dis- 
tant period are, however, both obscure. Before long she 
acquired another name than Portia in the Shelley house- 
hold, and now she is better known to fame as the "Brown 
Demon." Eliza Westbrook took a strong dislike to her; 
Harriet followed suit; and Shelley himself found that he 
had liked her better at a distance than in close companion- 
ship. She had at last to be bought off or bribed to leave. 
The scene now shifts with bewildering frequency ; nor 
is it easy to trace the Shelleys in their rapid flight. 
About the 21st of April, they settled for a short time at 
Nantgwilt, near Rhayader, in North Wales. Ere long we 
find them at Lynmouth, on the Somersetshire coast. Here 
Shelley continued his political propaganda, by circulating 
the Declaration of Rights, whereof mention has already 
been made. It was, as Mr. W. M. Rossetti first pointed 
out, a manifesto concerning the ends of government and 
the rights of man, — framed in imitation of two similar 
French Revolutionary documents, issued by the Constit- 
uent Assembly in August, 1*789, and by Robespierre in 
4 



66 SHELLEY. [chap. 

April, 1793. 1 Shelley used to seal this pamphlet in bot- 
tles and set it afloat upon the sea, hoping perhaps that 
after this wise it would traverse St. George's Channel and 
reach the sacred soil of Erin. He also employed his ser- 
vant, Daniel Hill, to distribute it among the Somersetshire 
farmers. On the 19th of August this man was arrested 
in the streets of Barnstaple, and sentenced to six months' 
imprisonment for uttering a seditious pamphlet ; and the 
remaining copies of the Declaration of Rights were de- 
stroyed. In strong contrast with the puerility of these 
proceedings, is the grave and lofty Letter to Lord Ellen- 
borough, composed at Lynmouth, and printed at Barnsta- 
ple. 2 A printer, named D. J. Eaton, had recently been sen- 
tenced to imprisonment by his Lordship for publishing 
the Third Part of Paine' s Age of Reason. Shelley's epis- 
tle is an eloquent argument in favour of toleration and 
the freedom of the intellect, carrying the matter beyond 
the instance of legal tyranny which occasioned its .compo- 
sition, and treating it with philosophic, if impassioned se- 
riousness. 

An extract from this composition will serve to show his 
power of handling weighty English prose, while yet a 
youth of hardly twenty. I have chosen a passage bearing 
on his theological opinions : — 

Moral qualities are such as only a human being can possess. To 
attribute them to the Spirit of the Universe, or to suppose that it is 
capable of altering them, is to degrade God into man, and to annex 
to this incomprehensible Being qualities incompatible with any pos- 
sible definition of his nature. 

It may be here objected : Ought not the Creator to possess the 



1 Reprinted in McCarthy, p. 324. 

2 Reprinted in Lady Shelley's Memorials, p. 29. 



in.] LIFE IN LONDON AND FIRST MAKRIAGE. 67 

perfections of the creature ? No. To attribute to God the moral 
qualities of man, is to suppose him susceptible of passions, which, 
arising out of corporeal organization, it is plain that a pure spirit 
cannot possess. . . . But even suppose, with the vulgar, that God is 
a venerable old man, seated on a throne of clouds, his breast the 
theatre of various passions, analogous to those of humanity, his will 
changeable and uncertain as that of an earthly king ; still, goodness 
and justice are qualities seldom nominally denied him, and it will be 
admitted that he disapproves of any action incompatible with those 
qualities. Persecution for opinion is unjust. "With what consistency, 
then, can the worshippers of a Deity whose benevolence they boast, 
embitter the existence of their fellow-being, because his- idea's of that 
Deity are different from those which they entertain ? Alas ! there is 
no consistency in those persecutors who worship a benevolent Dei- 
ty ; those who worship a demon would alone act consonantly to these 
principles by imprisoning and torturing in his name. 

Shelley had more than once urged Godwin and his 
family to visit him. The sage of Skinner Street thought 
that now was a convenient season. Accordingly he left 
London, and travelled by coach to Lynmouth, where he 
found that the Shelleys had flitted a few days previously 
without giving any notice. This fruitless journey of the 
poet's. Mentor is humorously described by Hogg, as well 
as one undertaken by himself in the following year to 
Dublin with a similar result. The Shelleys were now es- 
tablished at Tan-yr-allt, near Tremadoc, in North Wales, 
on an estate belonging to Mr. W. A. Madocks, M.P. for 
Boston. This gentleman had reclaimed a considerable 
extent of marshy ground from the sea, and protected it 
with an embankment. Shelley, whose interest in the poor 
people around him was always keen and practical, lost no 
time in making their acquaintance at Tremadoc. The 
work of utility carried out by his landlord aroused his 
enthusiastic admiration; and when the embankment was 
em perilled by a heavy sea, he got up a subscription for its 



68 SHELLEY. [chap. 

preservation. Heading the list with 500/., how raised, or 
whether paid, we know not, he endeavoured to extract 
similar sums from the neighbouring gentry, and even ran 
up with Harriet to London to use his influence for the 
same purpose with the Duke of Norfolk. On this occasion 
he made the personal acquaintance of the Godwin family. 

Life at Tanyrallt was smooth and studious, except for 
the diversion caused by the peril to the embankment. 
We hear of Harriet continuing her Latin studies, reading 
Odes of Horace, and projecting an epistle in that language 
to Hogg. Shelley, as usual, collected many books around 
him. There are letters extant in which he writes to Lon- 
don for Spinoza and Kant, Plato, and the works of the 
chief Greek historians. It appears that at this period, un- 
der the influence of Godwin, he attempted to conquer a 
strong natural dislike for history. " I am determined to 
apply myself to a study which is hateful and disgusting to 
my very soul, but which is above all studies necessary for 
him who would be listened to as a mender of antiquated 
abuses, — I mean, that record of crimes and miseries — 
history." Although he may have made an effort to apply 
himself to historical reading, he was not successful. His 
true bias inclined him to metaphysics colored by a glow- 
ing fancy, and to poetry penetrated with speculative en- 
thusiasm. In the historic sense he was deficient; and 
when he made a serious effort at a later period to com- 
pose a tragedy upon the death of Charles I., this work was 
taken up with reluctance, continued with effort, and finally 
abandoned. 

In the same letters he speaks about a collection of short 
poems on which he was engaged, and makes frequent al- 
lusions to Queen Mab. It appears from his own asser- 
tion, and from Med win's biography, that a poem on Queen 



in.] LIFE IN LONDON AND FIRST MARRIAGE. 69 

Mab had been projected and partially written by him at 
the early age of eighteen. But it was not taken seriously 
in hand until the spring of J. 812 ; nor was it finished and 
printed before 1813. The first impression was a private 
issue of 250 copies, on fine paper, which Shelley distributed 
to people whom he wished to influence. It was pirated 
soon after its appearance, and again in 1821 it was given 
to the public by a bookseller named Clarke. Against the 
latter republication Shelley energetically protested, dis- 
claiming in a letter addressed to The JUxaminer, from Pisa, 
June 22, 1821, any interest in a production which he had 
not even seen for several years. " I doubt not but that 
it is perfectly worthless in point of literary composition ; 
and that in all that concerns moral and political specula- 
tion, as well as in the subtler discriminations of meta- 
physical and religious doctrine, it is still more crude and 
immature. I am a devoted enemy to religious, political, 
and domestic oppression ; and I regret this publication, 
not so much from literary vanity as because I fear it is 
better fitted to injure than to serve the sacred cause of 
freedom." This judgment is undoubtedly severe ; but, 
though exaggerated in its condemnation, it, like all Shel- 
ley's criticisms on his own works, expresses the truth. 
We cannot include Queen Mab, in spite of its sonorous 
rhetoric and fervid declamation, in the canon of his mas- 
terpieces. It had a succes de scandale on its first appear- 
ance, and fatally injured Shelley's reputation. As a work 
of art it lacks maturity and permanent vitality. 

The Shelleys were suddenly driven away from Tanyr- 
allt by a mysterious occurrence, of which no satisfactory 
explanation has yet been given. According to letters 
written by himself and Harriet soon after the event, and 
confirmed by the testimony of Eliza, Shelley was twice 



70 SHELLEY. [chap. 

attacked upon the night of Feb. 24 by an armed ruffian, 
with whom he struggled in a hand-to-hand combat. Pis- 
tols were fired and windows broken, and Shelley's night- 
gown was shot through : but the assassin made his escape 
from the house without being recognized. His motive 
and his personality still remain matters of conjecture. 
Whether the whole affair was a figment of Shelly 's brain, 
rendered more than usually susceptible by laudanum taken 
to assuage intense physical pain ; whether it was a perilous 
hoax played upon him by the Irish servant, Daniel Hill ; 
or whether, as he himself surmised, the crime was insti- 
gated by an unfriendly neighbour, it is impossible to say. 
Strange adventures of this kind, blending fact and fancy 
in a now inextricable tangle, are of no unfrequent occur- 
rence in Shelley's biography. In estimating the relative 
proportions of the two factors in this case, it must be 
borne in mind, on the one hand, that no one but Shelley, 
who was alone in the parlour, and who for some unexplain- 
ed reason had loaded his pistols on the evening before the 
alleged assault, professed to have seen the villain ; and, on 
the other, that the details furnished by Harriet, and con- 
firmed at a subsequent period by so hostile a witness as 
Eliza, are too circumstantial to be lightly set aside. 

On the whole it appears most probable that Shelley on 
this night was the subject of a powerful hallucination. 
The theory of his enemies at Tanyrallt, that the story had 
been invented to facilitate his escape from the neighbour- 
hood without paying his bills, may be dismissed. But no 
investigation on the spot could throw any clear light on 
the circumstance, and Shelley's friends, Hogg, Peacock, 
and Mr. Madocks, concurred in regarding the affair as a 
delusion. 

There was no money in the common purse of the Sliel- 



in.] LIFE IN LONDON AND FIRST MARRIAGE. 11 

leys at this moment. In their distress they applied to Mr. 
T. Hookham, a London publisher, who sent them enough 
to carry them across the Irish Channel. After a short 
residence in 35, Cuffe Street, Dublin, and a flying visit to 
Killarney, they returned to London. Eliza, for some rea- 
son as unexplained as the whole episode of this second 
visit to Ireland, was left behind for a short season. The 
flight from Tanyrallt closes the first important period of 
Shelley's life ; and his settlement in London marks the 
beginning of another, fruitful of the gravest consequences 
and decisive of his future. 



CHAPTER IV. 

SECOND RESIDENCE IN LONDON, AND SEPARATION FROM 
HARRIET. 

Early in May the Shelleys arrived in London, where they 
were soon joined by Eliza, from whose increasingly irk- 
some companionship the poet had recently enjoyed a few 
weeks' respite. After living for a short while in hotels, 
they took lodgings in Half Moon Street. The house had 
a projecting window, where the poet loved to sit with book 
in hand, and catch, according to his custom, the maximum 
of sunlight granted by a chary English summer. " He 
wanted," said one of his female admirers, " only a pan of 
clear water and a fresh turf to look like some young 
lady's lark, hanging outside for air and song." Accord- 
ing to Hogg, this period of London life was a pleasant 
and tranquil episode in Shelley's troubled career. His 
room was full of books, among which works of German 
metaphysics occupied a prominent place, though they were 
not deeply studied. He was now learning Italian, and 
made his first acquaintance with Tasso, Ariosto, and Pe- 
trarch. 

The habits of the household were, to say the least, ir- 
regular; for Shelley took no thought of sublunary mat- 
ters, and Harriet was an in different housekeeper. Dinner 
seems to have come to them less by forethought than by 



iv.] SECOND RESIDENCE IN LONDON. 73 

the operation of divine chance ; and when there was no 
meat provided for the entertainment of casual guests, the 
table was supplied with buns, procured by Shelley from 
the nearest pastry-cook. He had already abjured animal 
food and alcohol ; and his favourite diet consisted of pulse 
or bread, which he ate dry with water, or made into pa- 
nada. Hogg relates how, when he was walking in the 
streets and felt hungry, he would dive into a baker's shop 
and emerge with a loaf tucked under his arm. This he 
consumed as he went along, very often reading at the same 
time, and dodging the foot-passengers with the rapidity of 
movement which distinguished him. He could not com- 
prehend how any man should want more than bread. " I 
have dropped a word, a hint," says Hogg, " about a pud- 
ding ; a pudding, Bysshe said dogmatically, is a preju- 
dice." This indifference to diet was highly characteristic 
of Shelley. During the last years of his life, even when 
he was suffering from the frequent attacks of a painful 
disorder, he took no heed of food ; and his friend, Tre- 
lawny, attributes the derangement of his health, in a great 
measure, to this carelessness. Mrs. Shelley used to send 
him something to eat into the room where he habitually 
studied ; but the plate frequently remained untouched for 
hours upon a bookshelf, and at the end of the day he 
might be heard asking, " Mary, have I dined?" His dress 
was no less simple than his diet. Hogg says that he never 
saw him in a great coat, and that his collar was unbut- 
toned to let the air play freely on his throat. " In the 
street or road he reluctantly wore a hat; but in fields 
and gardens, his little round head had no other covering 
than his long, wild, ragged locks." Shelley's head, as is 
well known, was remarkably small and round ; he used to 
plunge it several times a day in cold water, and expose it 
4* 



74 SHELLEY. [chap. 

recklessly to the in tensest heat of fire or sun. Mrs. Shel- 
ley relates that a great part of the Cenci was written on 
their house-roof near Leghorn, where Shelley lay exposed 
to the unmitigated ardour of Italian summer heat; and 
Hogg describes him reading Homer by a blazing fire-light, 
or roasting his skull upon the hearth-rug by the hour. 

These personal details cannot be omitted by the biogra- 
pher of such a man as Shelley. He was an elemental and 
primeval creature, as little subject to the laws of custom 
in his habits as in his modes of thought, living literally 
as the spirit moved him, with a natural nonchalance that 
has perhaps been never surpassed. To time and place he 
was equally indifferent, and could not be got to remember 
his engagements. " He took strange caprices, unfounded 
frights and dislikes, vain apprehensions and panic terrors, 
and therefore he absented himself from formal and sa- 
cred engagements. He was unconscious and oblivious of 
times, places, persons, and seasons ; and falling into some 
poetic vision, some day-dream, he quickly and completely 
forgot all that he had repeatedly and solemnly promised ; 
or he ran away after some object of imaginary urgency 
and importance, which suddenly came into his head, set- 
ting off in vain pursuit of it, he knew not whither. When 
he was caught, brought up in custody, and turned over to 
the ladies, with, Behold, your King ! to be caressed, court- 
ed, admired, and flattered, the king of beauty and fancy 
would too commonly bolt; slip away, steal out, creep off; 
unobserved and almost magically he vanished; thus mys- 
teriously depriving his fair subjects of his much-coveted, 
long looked-for company." If he had been fairly caged 
and found himself in congenial company, he let time pass 
unheeded, sitting up all night to talk, and chaining his au- 
dience by the spell of his unrivalled eloquence ; for won- 



iy.] SECOND RESIDENCE IX LONDON. 75 

derful as was his poetry, those who enjoyed the privilege 
of converse with him, judged it even more attractive. "He 
was commonly most communicative, unreserved, and elo- 
quent, and enthusiastic, when those around him were in- 
clining to yield to the influence of sleep, or rather at the 
hour when they would have been disposed to seek their 
chambers, but for the bewitching charms of his discourse." 

From Half Moon Street the Shelleys moved into a house 
in Pimlico; and it was here, according to Hogg, or at 
Cooke's Hotel in Dover Street according to other accounts, 
that Shelley's first child, Ianthe Eliza, was born about the 
end of June, 1813. Harriet did not take much to her lit- 
tle girl, and gave her over to a wet-nurse, for whom Shel- 
ley conceived a great dislike. That a mother should not 
nurse her own baby was no doubt contrary to his princi- 
ples; and the double presence of the servant and Eliza, 
whom he now most cordially detested, made his home un- 
comfortable. We have it on excellent authority, that of 
Mr. Peacock, that he " was extremely fond of it (the child), 
and would walk up and down a room with it in his arms 
for a long time together, singing to it a song of his own 
making, which ran on the repetition of a word of his own 
coining. His song was Yahmani, Yahmani, Yahmani, 
Yahmani." To the want of sympathy between the father 
and the mother in this matter of Ianthe, Mr. Peacock is 
inclined to attribute the beo'innino- of troubles in the Shel- 
ley household. There is, indeed, no doubt that the reve- 
lation of Harriet's maternal coldness must have been ex- 
tremely painful to her husband ; and how far she carried 
her insensibility, may be gathered from a story told by 
Hogg about her conduct during an operation performed 
upon the child. 

During this period of his sojourn in London, Shelley 



•76 SHELLEY. [chap. 

was again in some pecuniary difficulties. Yet he indulged 
Harriet's vanity by setting up a carriage, in which they 
afterwards took a hurried journey to Edinburgh and back. 
He narrowly escaped a debtor's prison through this act of 
extravagance, and by a somewhat ludicrous mistake Hogg 
was arrested for the debt due to the coach-maker. His ac- 
quaintances were few and scattered, and he saw nothing of 
his family. Gradually, however, he seems to have become 
a kind of prophet in a coterie of learned ladies. The 
views he had propounded in Queen Mab, his passionate be- 
lief in the perfectibility of man, his vegetarian doctrines, 
and his readiness to adopt any new nostrum for the amel- 
ioration of the race, endeared him to all manners of strange 
people ; nor was he deterred by aristocratic prejudices from 
frequenting society which proved extremely uncongenial 
to Hogg, and of which we have accordingly some caustic 
sketches from his pen. His chief friends were a Mrs. 
Boinville, for whom he conceived an enthusiastic admira- 
tion, and her daughter Cornelia,, married to a vegetarian, 
Mr. Newton. In order to be near them he had moved 
to Pimlico; and his next move, from London to a cot- 
tage named High Elms, at Bracknell, in Berkshire, had the 
same object. With Godwin and his family he was also 
on terms of familiar intercourse. Under the philosopher's 
roof in Skinner Street there was now gathered a group of 
miscellaneous inmates — Fanny Imlay, the daughter of his 
first wife, Mary Wollstonecraft ; Mary, his own daughter 
by the same marriage ; his second wife, and her two chil- 
dren, Claire and Charles Clairmont, the offspring of a pre- 
vious union. From this connexion with the Godwin house- 
hold events of the gravest importance in the future were 
destined to arise, and already it appears that Fanny Im- 
lay had begun to look with perilous approval on the fasci- 



iv.] SECOND KESIDENCE IN LONDON. 11 

nating poet. Hogg and Mr. Peacock, the well-known nov- 
elist, described by Mrs. Newton as " a cold scholar, who, 
I think, has neither taste nor feeling," were his only in- 
timates. 

Mrs. Newton's unfair judgment of Mr. Peacock marks a 
discord between the two chief elements of Shelley's pres- 
ent society ; and indeed it will appear to a careful student 
of his biography that Hogg, Peacock, and Harriet, now 
stood somewhat by themselves and aloof from the inner 
circle of his associates. If we regard the Shelleys as the 
centre of an extended line, we shall find the Westbrook 
family at one end, the Boinville family at the other, with 
Hogg and Peacock somewhere in the middle. Harriet 
was naturally drawn to the Westbrook extremity, and SheL 
ley to the Boinville. Peacock had no affinity for either, 
but a sincere regard for Harriet as well as for her hus- 
band ; while Hogg was in much the same position, except 
that he had made friends with Mrs. Newton. The God- 
wins, of great importance to Shelley himself, exercised their 
influence at a distance from the rest. Frequent change 
from Bracknell to London and back again, varied by the 
flying journey to Edinburgh, and a last visit paid in strict- 
est secrecy to his mother and sisters, at Field Place, of 
which a very interesting record is left in the narrative of 
Mr. Kennedy, occupied the interval between July, 1813, 
and March, 1814. The period was not productive of lit- 
erary masterpieces. We only hear of a Refutation of 
Deism, a dialogue between Eusebes and Theosophus, which 
attacked all forms of Theistic belief. 

Since we are now approaching the gravest crisis in Shel- 
ley's life, it behoves us to be more than usually careful in 
considering his circumstances at this epoch. His home 
had become cold and dull. Harriet did not love her child, 



18 SHELLEY. [chap. ii. 

and spent ber time in a great measure with her Mount 
Street relations. Eliza was a source of continual irrita- 
tion, and the Westbrook family did its best, by interfer- 
ence and suggestion, to refrigerate the poet's feelings for 
his wife. On the other hand he found among the Boin- 
ville set exactly that high-flown, enthusiastic, sentimental 
atmosphere which suited his idealizing temper. Two ex- 
tracts from a letter written to Hogg upon the 16th of 
March, 1814, speak more eloquently than any analysis, and 
will place before the reader the antagonism which had 
sprung up in Shelley's mind between his own home and 
the circle of his new friends : — " I have been staying with 

Mrs. B for the last month; I have escaped, in the 

society of all that philosophy and friendship combine, 
from the dismaying solitude of myself. They have re- 
vived in my heart the expiring flame of life. I have felt 
myself translated to a paradise, which has nothing of mor- 
tality but its transitoriness ; my heart sickens at the view 
of that necessity, which will quickly divide me from the 
delightful tranquillity of this happy home, — for it has be- 
come my home. The trees, the bridge, the minutest ob- 
jects, have already a place in my affections." 

" Eliza is still with us — not here ! — but will be with me 
when the infinite malice of destiny forces me to depart. 
I am now but little inclined to contest this point. I cer- 
tainly hate her with all my heart and soul. It is a sight 
which awakens an inexpressible sensation of disgust and 
horror, to see her caress my poor little Ianthe, in whom I 
may hereafter find the consolation of sympathy. I. some- 
times feel faint with the fatigue of checking the over- 
flowings of my unbounded abhorrence for this miserable 
wretch. But she is no more than a blind and loathsome 
worm, that cannot see to sting." 



it.] SECOND RESIDENCE IN LONDON. 19 

"While divided in this way between a home which had 
become distasteful to him, and a house where he found 
scope for his most romantic outpourings of sensibility, 
Shelley fell suddenly and passionately in love with God- 
win's daughter, Mary. Peacock, who lived in close inti- 
macy with him at this period, must deliver his testimony 
as to the overwhelming nature of the new attachment: — 
" Nothing that I ever read in tale or history could pre- 
sent a more striking image of a sudden, violent, irresistible, 
uncontrollable passion, than that under which I found him 
labouring when, at his request, I went up from the country 
to call on him in London. Between his old feelings to- 
wards Harriet, from ivhom he was not then separated, and 
his new passion for Mary, he showed in his looks, in his 
gestures, in his speech, the state of a mind ' suffering, like 
a little kingdom, the nature of an insurrection.' His eyes 
were bloodshot, his hair and dress disordered. He caught 
up a bottle of laudanum, and said, i I never part from this.' " 

"We may therefore affirm, I think, with confidence that 
in the winter and spring of 1814, Shelley had been be- 
coming gradually more and more estranged from Harriet, 
whose commonplace nature was no mate for his, and 
whom he had never loved with all the depth of his affec- 
tion ; that his intimacy with the Boinville family had 
brought into painful prominence whatever was jarring and 
repugnant to him in his home ; and that in this crisis of 
his fate he had fallen in love for the first time seriously 
with Mary Godwin. 1 She was then a girl of sixteen, " fair 
and fair-haired, pale indeed, and with a piercing look," to 
quote Hogg's description of her, as she first appeared be- 
fore him on the 8th or 9th of June, 1814. With her 

1 The date at which he first made Mary's acquaintance is uncer- 
tain. Peacock says that it was between April 18 and June 8. 



80 SHELLEY. [chap. 

freedom from prejudice, her tense and high-wrought sen- 
sibility, her acute intellect, enthusiasm for ideas, and vivid 
imagination, Mary Godwin was naturally a fitter compan- 
ion for Shelley than the good Harriet, however beautiful. 

That Shelley early in 1814 had no intention of leaving 
his wife, is probable ; for he was re-married to her on the 
24th of March, eight days after his impassioned letter to 
Hogg, in St. George's, Hanover Square. Harriet was 
pregnant, and this ratification of the Scotch marriage was 
no doubt intended to place the legitimacy of a possible 
heir beyond all question. Yet it seems, if we may found 
conjecture on "Stanzas, April, 1814," that in the very 
month after this new ceremony Shelley found the diffi- 
culties of his wedded life insuperable, and that he was 
already making up his mind to part from Harriet. About 
the middle of June the separation actually occurred — not 
by mutual consent, so far as any published documents 
throw light upon the matter, but rather by Shelley's sud- 
den abandonment of his wife and child. 1 For a short 
while Harriet was left in ignorance of his abode, and with 
a very insufficient sum of money at her disposal. She 
placed herself under the protection of her father, retired 
to Bath, and about the beginning of July received a letter 
from Shelley, who was thenceforth solicitous for her wel- 
fare, keeping up a correspondence with her, supplying her 
with funds, and by no means shrinking from personal 
.communications. 

That Shelley must bear the responsibility of this sep- 
aration seems to me quite clear. His justification is to 
be found in his avowed opinions on the subject of love 

1 Leigh Hunt, Autob. p. 236, and Medwin, however, both assert 
that it was by mutual consent. The whole question must be studied 
in Peacock and in Garnett, Relics of Shelley, p. 14*7. 



it.] SEPARATION FROM HARRIET. 81 

and marriage — opinions which Harriet knew well and 
professed to share, and of which he had recently made 
ample confession in the notes to Queen Mab. The world 
will still agree with Lord Eldon in regarding those opin- 
ions as dangerous to society, and a blot upon the poet's 
character; but it would be unfair, while condemning 
them as frankly as he professed them, to blame him also 
because he did not conform to the opposite code of 
morals, for which he frequently expressed extreme ab- 
horrence, and which he stigmatized, however wrongly, as 
the source of the worst social vices. It must be added 
that the Shelley family in their memorials of the poet, 
and through their friend, Mr. Richard Garnett, inform us, 
without casting any slur on Harriet, that documents are 
extant which will completely vindicate the poet's conduct 
in this matter. It is therefore but just to await their 
publication before pronouncing a decided judgment. 
Meanwhile there remains no doubt about the -fact that 
forty days after leaving Harriet, Shelley departed from 
London with Mary Godwin, who had consented to share 
his fortunes. How he plighted his new troth, and won 
the hand of her who was destined to be his companion 
for life, may best be told in Lady Shelley's words : — 

" His anguish, his isolation, his difference from other 
men, his gifts of genius and eloquent enthusiasm, made a 
deep impression on Godwin's daughter Mary, now a girl 
of sixteen, who had been accustomed to hear Shelley 
spoken of as something rare and strange. To her, as they 
met one eventful day in St. Pancras Churchyard, by her 
mother's grave, Bysshe, in burning words, poured forth 
the tale of his wild past — how he had suffered, how he 
had been misled, and how, if supported by her love, he 
hoped in future years to enrol his name with the wise and 



82 SHELLEY. [chap. 

good who had done battle for their fellow-men, and been 
true through all adverse storms to the cause of humanity. 
Unhesitatingly, she placed her hand in his, and linked her 
fortune with his own ; and most truthfully, as the re- 
maining portions of these Memorials will prove, was the 
pledge of both redeemed. The theories in which the 
daughter of the authors of Political Justice, and of the 
Rights of Woman, had been educated, spared her from 
any conflict between her duty and her affection. For she 
was the child of parents whose writings had had for their 
object to prove that marriage was one among the many 
institutions which a new era in the history of mankind 
was about to sweep away. By her father, whom she 
loved — by the writings of her mother, whom she had been 
taught to venerate — these doctrines had been rendered 
familiar to her mind. It was therefore natural that she 
should listen to the dictates of her own heart, and willing- 
ly unite her fate with one who was so worthy of her love." 
Soon after her withdrawal to Bath, Harriet gave birth 
to Shelley's second child, Charles Bysshe, who died in 
1826. She subsequently formed another connexion which 
proved unhappy; and on the 10th of November, 1816, 
she committed suicide by drowning herself in the Serpen- 
tine. The distance of time between June, 1814, and No- 
vember, 1816, and the new ties formed by Harriet in this 
interval, prove that there was no immediate connexion be- 
tween Shelley's abandonment of his wife and her suicide. 
She had always entertained the thought of self-destruction, 
as Hogg, who is no adverse witness in her case, has am- 
ply recorded ; and it may be permitted us to suppose that, 
finding herself for the second time unhappy in her love, 
she reverted to a long-since cherished scheme, and cut the 
knot of life and all its troubles. 



it.] SEPARATION FROM HARRIET. 83 

So far as this is possible, I have attempted to narrate 
the most painful episode in Shelley's life as it occurred, 
without extenuation and without condemnation. Until 
the papers, mentioned with such insistence by Lady Shel- 
ley and Mr. Garnett, are given to the world, it is impos- 
sible that the poet should not bear the reproach of heart- 
lessness and inconstancy in this the gravest of all human 
relations. Such, however, is my belief in the essential 
goodness of his character, after allowing, as we must do, 
for the operation of his peculiar principles upon his con- 
duct, that I for my own part am willing to suspend my 
judgment till the time arrives for his vindication. The 
language used by Lady Shelley and Mr. Garnett justify us 
in expecting that that vindication will be as startling as 
complete. If it is not, they, as pleading for him, will 
have overshot the mark of prudence. 

On the 28th of July Shelley left London with Mary 
Godwin, who up to this date had remained beneath her 
father's roof. There was some secrecy in their departure, 
because they were accompanied by Miss Clairmont, whose 
mother disapproved of her forming a third in the party. 
Having made their way to Dover, they crossed the Chan- 
nel in an open boat, and went at once to Paris. Here 
they hired a donkey for their luggage, intending to per- 
form the journey across France on foot. Shelley, how- 
ever, sprained his ancle, and a mule-carriage was provided 
for the party. In this conveyance they reached the Jura, 
and entered Switzerland at Neufchatel. Brunnen, on the 
Lake of Lucerne, w T as chosen for their residence ; and here 
Shelley began his romantic tale of The Assassins, a por- 
tion of which is printed in his prose works. Want of 
money compelled them soon to think of turning their steps 
homeward; and the back journey was performed upon 



84 SHELLEY. [chap. 

the Reuss and Rhine. They reached Gravesend, after a 
bad passage, on the 13th of September. Mrs. Shelley's 
History of a Six Weeks' Tour relates the details of this 
trip, which was of great importance in forming Shelley's 
taste, and in supplying him with the scenery of river, rock, 
and- mountain, so splendidly utilized in Alastor. 

The autumn was a period of more than usual money 
difficulty; but on the 6th of January, 1815, Sir Bysshe 
died, Percy became the next heir to the baronetcy and 
the family estates, and an arrangement was made with 
his father by right of which he received an allowance of 
1000^ a year, A portion of his income was immediately 
set apart for Harriet The winter was passed in London, 
where Shelley walked a hospital, in order, it is said, to 
acquire some medical knowledge that might be of service 
to the poor he visited. His own health at this period was 
very bad, A physician whom he consulted pronounced 
that he was rapidly sinking under pulmonary disease, and 
he suffered frequent attacks of acute pain. The consump- 
tive symptoms seem to have been so marked that for the 
next three years he had no doubt that he was destined tc 
an early death. In 1818, however, all danger of phthisis 
passed away ; and during the rest of his short life he only 
suffered from spasms and violent pains in the side, which 
baffled the physicians, but, though they caused him ex- 
treme anguish, did not menace any vital organ. To the 
subject of his health it will be necessary to return at a 
later period of this biography. For the present it is 
enough to remember that his physical condition was such 
as to justify his own expectation of death at no distant 
time. 1 

Fond as ever of wandering, Shelley set out in the early 
1 See Letter to Godwin in Shelley's Memorials, p. 18. 



it.] SEPARATION FROM HARRIET. 85 

summer for a tour with Mary. They visited Devonshire 
and Clifton, and then settled in a house on Bishopsgate 
Heath, near Windsor Forest. The summer was further 
broken by a water excursion up the Thames to its source, 
in the company of Mr. Peacock and Charles Clairmont. 
Peacock traces the poet's taste for boating, which af- 
terwards became a passion with him, to this excursion. 
About this there is, however, some doubt. Medwin tells 
us that Shelley while a boy delighted in being on the 
water, and that he enjoyed the pastime at Eton. On the 
other hand, Mr. W. S. Halliday, a far better authority than 
Medwin, asserts positively that he never saw Shelley on 
the river at Eton, and Hogg relates nothing to prove that 
he practised rowing at Oxford. It is certain that, though 
inordinately fond of boats and every kind of water — river, 
sea, lake, or canal — he never learned to swim. Peacock 
also notices his habit of floating paper boats, and gives an 
amusing description of the boredom suffered by Hogg on 
occasions when Shelley would stop by the side of pond or 
mere to float a mimic navy. The not altogether apocry- 
phal story of his having once constructed a boat out of a 
bank-post-bill, and launched it on the lake in Kensington 
Gardens, deserves to be alluded to in this connexion. 

On their return from this river journey, Shelley began 
the poem of Alastor, haunting the woodland glades and 
oak groves of Windsor Forest, and drawing from that 
noble scenery his inspiration. It was printed with a few 
other poems in one volume the next year. Not only was 
Alastor the first serious poem published by Shelley; but 
it was also the first of his compositions which revealed 
the greatness of his genius. Rarely has blank verse been 
written with more majesty and music: and while the in- 
fluence of Milton and Wordsworth mav be traced in cer- 



86 SHELLEY. [chap. 

tain passages, the versification, tremulous with lyrical vi- 
brations, is such as only Shelley could have produced. 

"Alastor" is the Greek name for a vengeful daemon, 
driving its victim into desert places ; and Shelley, prompt- 
ed by Peacock, chose it for the title of a poem which de- 
scribes the Nemesis of solitary souls. Apart from its in- 
trinsic merit as a work of art, Alastor has great autobio- 
graphical value. Mrs. Shelley affirms that it was written 
under the expectation of speedy death, and under the 
sense of disappointment, consequent upon the misfortunes 
of his early life. This accounts for the somewhat un- 
healthy vein of sentiment which threads the wilderness of 
its sublime descriptions; Ail that Shelley had observed 
of natural beauty — in Wales, at Lynton, in Switzerland, 
upon the eddies of the Reuss, beneath the oak shades of 
the forest — is presented to us in a series of pictures pene- 
trated with profound emotion. But the deeper meaning 
of Alqstpr is to be found, not in the thought of death nor 
in the poet's recent communings with nature, but in the 
motto from St. Augustine placed upon its title-page, and 
in the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, composed about a 
year later. Enamoured of ideal loveliness, the poet pur- 
sues his vision through the universe, vainly hoping to as- 
suage the thirst which has been stimulated in his spirit, 
and vainly longing for some mortal realization of his love. 
Alastor, like Epipsychidion, reveals the mistake which 
Shelley made in thinking that the idea of beauty could 
become incarnate for him in any earthly form : while the 
Hymn to Intellectual Beauty recognizes the truth that 
such realization of the ideal is impossible. The very last 
letter written by Shelley sets the misconception in its 
proper light : " I think one is always in love with some- 
thing or other; the error, and I confess it is not easy for 



iv.] SEPARATION FROM HARRIET. 87 

spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it, consists in 
seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is, perhaps, 
eternal." But this Shelley discovered only with "the 
years that bring the philosophic mind," and when he was 
upon the very verge of his untimely death. 

The following quotation is a fair specimen of the blank 
verse of Alastor. It expresses that longing for perfect 
sympathy in an ideal love, which the sense of divine beau- 
ty had stirred in the poet's heart : — 

At length upon the lone Chorasmian shore 
He paused, a wide and melancholy waste 
Of putrid marshes. A strong impulse urged 
His steps to the sea-shore. A swan was there, 
Beside a sluggish stream among the reeds. 
It rose as he approached,' and, with strong wings 
Scaling the upward sky, bent its bright course 
High over the immeasurable main. 
His eyes pursued its flight : — " Thou hast a home, 
Beautiful bird ! thou voyagest to thine home, 
" Where thy sweet mate will twine her flowny neck * 
With thine, and welcome thy return with eyes 
Bright in the lustre of their own fond joy. 
And what am I that I should linger here, 
With voice far sweeter than thy dying notes, 
Spirit more vast than thine, frame more attuned 
To beauty, wasting these surpassing powers 
In the deaf air, to the blind earth, and heaven 
That echoes not my thoughts ?" A gloomy smile 
Of desperate hope wrinkled his quivering lips. 
For Sleep, he knew, kept most relentlessly 
Its precious charge, and silent Death exposed, 
Faithless perhaps as Sleep, a shadowy lure, 
With doubtful smile mocking its own strange charms. 

William, the eldest son of Shelley and Mary Godwin, 
was born on the 24th of Jan., 1816. In the spring of 
that year they went together, nccompanied by Miss Clair- 



88 SHELLEY. [chap. 

mont, for a second time to Switzerland. They reached 
Geneva on the 17th of May, and were soon after joined 
by Lord Byron and his travelling physician, Dr. Polidori. 
Shelley had not yet made Byron's acquaintance, though 
he had sent him a copy of Queen Mab^ with a letter, 
which miscarried in the post. They were now thrown 
into daily intercourse, occupying the villas Diodati and 
Mont Alegre, at no great distance from each other, passing 
their days upon the lake in a boat which they purchased, 
and spending the nights in conversation. Miss Clairmont 
had known Byron in London, and their acquaintance now- 
ripened into an intimacy, the fruit of which was the child 
Allegra. This fact has to be mentioned by Shelley's bi- 
ographer, because Allegra afterwards became an inmate 
of his home ; and though he and Mary were ignorant of 
what was passing at Geneva, they did not withdraw their 
sympathy from the mother of Lord Byron's daughter. 
The. lives of Byron and Shelley during the next six years 
were destined to be curiously blent. Both were to seek 
in Italy an exile-home ; while their friendship was to be- 
come one of the most interesting facts of English, literary 
history. The influence of Byron upon Shelley, as he 
more than once acknowledged, and as his wife plainly per- 
ceived, w ? as, to a great extent, depressing. For Byron's 
genius and its fruits in poetry he entertained the highest 
possible opinion. He could not help comparing bis own 
achievement and his fame with Byron's; and the result 
was that in the presence of one whom he erroneously be- 
lieved to be the greater poet, he became inactive. Shel- 
ley, on the contrary, stimulated Byron's productive faculty 
to nobler efforts, raised his moral tone, and infused into 
his less subtle intellect something of his own philosoph- 
ical depth and earnestness. Much as he enjoyed Byron's 



iv.] SEPARATION FROM HARRIET. 89 

society arid admired his writing, Shelley was not blind to 
the imperfections of his nature. The sketch which he has 
left us of Count Maddalo, the letters written to his wife 
from Venice and Ravenna, and his correspondence on the 
subject of Leigh Hunt's visit to Italy, supply the most dis- 
criminating criticism which has yet been passed upon his 
brother poet's character. It is clear that he never found 
in Byron a perfect friend, and that he had not accepted 
him as one with whom he sympathized upon the deeper 
questions of feeling and conduct. Byron, for his part, rec- 
ognized in Shelley the purest nature he had ever known. 
"He was the most gentle, the most amiable, and least 
worldly-minded person I ever met ; full of delicacy, dis- 
interested beyond all other men, and possessing a degree 
of genius joined to simplicity as rare as it is admirable. 
He had formed to himself a beau ideal of all that is fine, 
high-minded, and noble, and he acted up to this ideal 
even to the very letter." 

Toward the end of June the two poets made the tour of 
Lake Geneva in their boat, and were very nearly wrecked 
off the rocks of Meillerie. On this occasion Shelley was 
in imminent danger of death from drowning. His one 
anxiety, however, as he wrote to Peacock, was lest Byron 
should attempt to save him at the risk of his own life. 
Byron described" him as "bold as a lion;" and indeed it 
may here be said, once and for all, that Shelley's physical 
courage was only equalled by his moral fearlessness. He 
carried both without bravado to the verge of temerity, and 
may justly be said to have never known what terror was, 
Another summer excursion was a visit to Chamouni, of 
which he has left memorable descriptions in his letters to 
Peacock, and in the somewhat Coleridgian verses on Mont 
Blanc. The preface to Laon and Cythna shows what a 



90 SHELLEY. [chap, 

powerful impression had been made upon him by the 
glaciers, and how he delighted in the element of peril. 
There is a tone of exultation in the words which record 
the experiences of his two journeys in Switzerland and 
France : — " I have been familiar from boyhood with moun- 
tains and lakes and the sea, and the solitude of forests. 
Danger, which sports upon the brink of precipices, has 
been my playmate. I have trodden the glaciers of the 
Alps, and lived under the eye of Mont Blanc. I have 
been a wanderer among distant fields. I have sailed down 
mighty rivers, and seen the sun rise and set, and the stars 
come forth, whilst I have sailed night and day down a 
rapid stream among mountains. I have seen populous 
cities, and have watched the passions which rise and 
spread, and sink and change amongst assembled multi- 
tudes of men. I have seen the theatre of the more visi- 
ble ravages of tyranny and war, cities and villages reduced 
to scattered groups of black and roofless houses, and the 
naked inhabitants sitting famished upon their desolated 
thresholds." 

On their return to the lake, the Shelleys found M. G. 
Lewis established with Byron. This addition to the cir- 
cle introduced much conversation about apparitions, and 
each member of the party undertook to produce a ghost 
story. Polidori's Vampyre and Mrs. Shelley's Franken- 
stein were the only durable results of their determination. 
But an incident occurred which is of some importance in 
the history of Shelley's psychological condition. Toward 
midnight on the 18th of July, Byron recited the lines in 
Christabel about the lady's breast; when Shelley sudden- 
ly started up, shrieked, and tied from the room. He had 
seen a vision of a woman with eyes instead of nipples. 
At this time he was writing notes upon the phenomena of 



iv.] SEPARATION FROM HARRIET. 91 

sleep to be inserted in his Speculations on Metaphysics, and 
Mrs. Shelley informs us that the mere effort to remember 
dreams of thrilling or mysterious import so disturbed his 
nervous system that he had to relinquish the task. At no 
period of his life was he wholly free from visions which 
had the reality of facts. Sometimes they occurred in 
sleep, aud were prolonged with painful vividness into his 
waking moments. Sometimes they seemed to grow out 
of his intense meditation, or to present themselves before 
his eyes as the projection of a powerful inner impression. 
All his sensations were abnormally acute, and his ever-ac- 
tive imagination confused the border-lands of the actual 
and the visionary. Such a nature as Shelley's, through its 
far greater susceptibility than is common even with artis- 
tic temperaments, was debarred in moments of high-strung- 
emotion from observing the ordinary distinctions of sub- 
ject and object; and this peculiar quality must never be 
forgotten when we seek to estimate the proper proportions 
of Dichtung und Wahrheit in certain episodes of his biog- 
raphy. The strange story, for example, told by Peacock 
about a supposed warning he had received in the spring 
of this year from Mr. Williams of Tremadoc, may possi- 
bly be explained on the hypothesis that his brooding 
thoughts had taken form before him, both ear and eye 
having been unconsciously pressed into the service of a 
subjective energy. 1 

On their return to England in September, Shelley took 
a cottage at Great Marlow on the Thames, in order to be 
near his friend Peacock. While it was being prepared 
for the reception of his family, he stayed at Bath, and 
there heard of Harriet's suicide. The life that once was 
dearest to him, had ended thus in misery, desertion, want. 

1 Fraser's Magazine, Jan., 18G0, p. 98. 



92 SHELLEY. [chap. 

The mother of his two children, abandoned by both her 
husband and her lover, and driven from her father's home, 
had drowned herself after a brief struggle with circum- 
stance. However Shelley may have felt that his con- 
science was free from blame, however small an element 
of self-reproach may have mingled with his grief and 
horror, there is no doubt that he suffered most acute- 
ly. His deepest ground for remorse seems to have been 
the conviction that he had drawn Harriet into a sphere of 
thought and feeling for which she was not qualified, and 
that had it not been for him and his opinions, she might 
have lived a happy woman in some common walk of life. 
One of his biographers asserts that " he continued to be 
haunted by certain recollections, partly real and partly im- 
aginative, which pursued him like an Orestes," and even 
Trelawny, who knew him only in the last months of his 
life, said that the impression of that dreadful moment 
was still vivid. We may trace the echo of his feelings 
in some painfully pathetic verses written in 1817 j 1 and 
though he did not often speak of Harriet, Peacock has 
recorded one memorable occasion on which he disclosed 
the anguish of his spirit to a friend. 2 

Shelley hurried at once to London, and found some 
consolation in the society of Leigh Hunt. The friend- 
ship extended to him by that excellent man at this season 
of his trouble may perhaps count for something with 
those who are inclined to judge him harshly. Two im- 
portant events followed immediately upon the tragedy. 
The first was Shelley's marriage with Mary Godwin on the 
30th of December, 1816. Whether Shelley would have 
taken this step except under strong pressure from with* 

1 Forman, iii. 148. 

2 Fraser, Jan., 1860, p. 102. 



iv.] SEPARATION FROM HARRIET. 93 

out, appears to me very doubtful. Of all men who ever 
lived, he was the most resolutely bent on confirming his 
theories by his practice; and in this instance there was no 
valid reason why he should not act up to principles pro- 
fessed in common by himself and the partner of his fort- 
unes, no less than by her father and her mother. It is, 
therefore, reasonable to suppose that he yielded to argu- 
ments; and these arguments must have been urged by 
Godwin, who had never treated him with cordiality since 
he left England in 1816. Godwin, though overrated in 
his generation, and almost ludicrously idealized by Shelley, 
was a man whose talents verged on genius. But he was 
by no means consistent. His conduct in money-matters 
shows that he could not live the life of a self-sufficing 
philosopher ; while the irritation he expressed when Shel- 
ley omitted to address him as Esquire, stood in comic con- 
tradiction with his published doctrines. We are therefore 
perhaps justified in concluding that he worried Shelley, 
the one enthusiastic and thorough-going follower he had, 
into marrying his daughter in spite of his disciple's prot- 
estations ; nor shall we be far wrong if we surmise that 
Godwin congratulated himself on Mary's having won the 
right to bear the name of a future baronet. 

The second event was the refusal of Mr. Westbrook to 
deliver up the custody of his grandchildren. A chancery 
suit was instituted ; at the conclusion of which, in August, 
1817, Lord Eldon deprived Shelley of his son and daughter 
on the double ground of his opinions expressed in Queen 
Mab, and of his conduct toward his first wife. The chil- 
dren were placed in the hands of a clergyman, to be edu- 
cated in accordance with principles diametrically opposed 
to their parent's, while Shelley's income was mulcted in a 
sum of 200Z. for their maintenance. Thus sternly did the 



94 SHELLEY. [chap. iv. 

father learn the value of that ancient iEschylean maxim, 
rw Spelaean 7rade~iy, the doer of the deed must suffer. His 
own impulsiveness, his reckless assumption of the heaviest 
responsibilities, his overweening confidence in his own 
strength to move the weight of the world's opinions, had 
brought him to this tragic pass — to the suicide of the 
woman who had loved him, and to the sequestration of 
the offspring whom he loved. 

Shelley is too great to serve as text for any sermon ; 
and yet we may learn from him as from a hero of Hebrew 
or Hellenic story. His life was a tragedy ; and like some 
protagonist of Greek drama, he was capable of erring and 
of suffering greatly. He had kicked against the altar of 
justice as established in the daily sanctities of human life ; 
and now he had to bear the penalty. The conventions he 
despised and treated like the dust beneath his feet, were 
found in this most cruel crisis to be a rock on which his 
very heart was broken. From this rude trial of his moral 
nature he arose a stronger being; and if longer life had 
been granted him, he would undoubtedly have presented 
the ennobling spectacle of one who had been lessoned by 
his own audacity, and by its bitter fruits, into harmony 
with the immutable laws which he was ever seeking to 
obey. It is just this conflict between the innate rectitude 
of Shelley's over-daring nature and the circumstances of 
ordinary existence, which makes his history so tragic ; and 
we may justly wonder whether, when he read the Sopho- 
clean tragedies of OEdipus, he did not apply their doctrine 
of self-will and Nemesis to his own fortunes. 



CHAPTER V. 

LIFE AT MARLOW, AND JOURNEY TO ITALY. 

Amid the torturing distractions of the Chancery suit about 
his children, and the still more poignant anguish of his 
own heart, and with the cloud of what he thought swift- 
coming death above his head, Shelley worked steadily, 
during the summer of 1817, upon his poem of Laon and 
Cythna. Six months were spent in this task. " The 
poem," to borrow Mrs. Shelley's words, " was written in 
his boat, as it floated under the beech-groves of Bisham, or 
during wanderings in the neighbouring country, which is 
distinguished for peculiar beauty." Whenever Shelley 
could, he composed in the open air. The terraces of the 
Villa Cappuccini at Este and the Baths of Caracalla were 
the birthplace of Prometheus. The Cenci was written on 
the roof of the Villa Valsovano at Leghorn. The Cascine 
of Florence, the pine -woods near Pisa, the lawns above 
San Giuliano, and the summits of the Euganean Hills, 
witnessed the creation of his loveliest lyrics ; and his last 
great poem, the Triumph of Life, was transferred to paper 
in his boat upon the Bay of Spezia. 

If Alastor had expressed one side of Shelley's nature, 
his devotion to Ideal Beauty, Laon and Cythna was in a 
far prof o under sense representative of its author. All his 
previous experiences and all his aspirations — his passion- 



96 SHELLEY. [chap. 

ate belief in friendship, Lis principle of the equality of 
women with men, his demand for bloodless revolution, his 
confidence in eloquence and reason to move nations, his 
doctrine of free love, his vegetarianism, his hatred of re- 
ligious intolerance and tyranny — are blent together and 
concentrated in the glowing cantos of this wonderful ro- 
mance. The hero, Laon, is himself idealized, the self 
which he imagined when he undertook his Irish cam- 
paign. The heroine, Cythna, is the helpmate he had al- 
ways dreamed, the woman exquisitely feminine, yet capa- 
ble of being fired with male enthusiasms, and of grappling 
the real problems of our nature with a man's firm grasp. 
In the first edition of the poem he made Laon and Cyth- 
na brother and sister, not because he believed in the de- 
sirability of incest, but because he wished to throw a glove 
down to society, and to attack the intolerance of custom 
in its stronghold. In the preface, he tells us that it was 
his purpose to kindle in the bosoms of his readers " a vir- 
tuous enthusiasm for those doctrines of liberty and jus- 
tice, that faith and hope in something good, which neither 
violence, nor misrepresentation, nor prejudice, can ever 
wholly extinguish among mankind ;" to illustrate " the 
growth and progress of individual mind aspiring after ex- 
cellence, and devoted to the love of mankind;" and to 
celebrate Love " as the sole law which should govern the 
moral world." The wild romantic treatment of this di- 
dactic motive makes the poem highly characteristic of its 
author. It is written in Spenserian stanzas, with a rapid- 
ity of movement and a dazzling brilliance that are Shel- 
ley's own. The story relates the kindling of a nation to 
freedom at the cry of a young poet-prophet, the tempo- 
rary triumph of the good cause, the final victory of des- 
potic force, and the martyrdom of the hero, together with 



v,] LIFE AT MARLOW. 97 

whom the heroine falls a willing victim. It is full of 
thrilling incidents and lovely pictures ; yet the tale is the 
least part of the poem ; and few readers have probably 
been able either to sympathize with its visionary charac- 
ters, or to follow the narrative without weariness. As in 
the case of other poems by Shelley — especially those in 
which he attempted to tell a story, for which kind of 
art his genius was not well suited — the central motive of 
Laon and Cythna is surrounded by so radiant a photo- 
sphere of imagery and eloquence that it is difficult to fix 
our gaze upon it, blinded as we are by the excess of splen- 
dour. Yet no one now can read the terrible tenth canto, 
or the lovely fifth, without feeling that a young eagle of 
poetry had here tried the full strength of his pinions in 
their flight. This truth was by no means recognized when 
Laon and Cythna first appeared before the public. Hoot- 
ed down, derided, stigmatized, and howled at, it only served 
to intensify the prejudice with which the author of Queen 
Mob had come to be regarded. 

I have spoken of this poem under its first name of Laon 
and Cythna. A certain number of copies were issued with 
this title j 1 but the publisher, Oilier, not without reason 
dreaded the effect the book would make ; be therefore in- 
duced Shelley to alter the relationship between the hero 
and his bride, and issued the old sheets with certain can- 
celled pages under the title of Revolt of Islam. It was 
published in January, 1818. While still resident at Mar- 
low, Shelley began two autobiographical poems — the one 
Prince Athanase, which he abandoned as too introspective 

1 How many copies were put in circulation is not known. There 
must certainly have been many more than the traditional three ; for 
when I was a boy at Harrow, I picked up two uncut copies in boards 
at a Bristol bookshop, for the price of 2s. 6<£ a piece. 
5* 



98 SHELLEY. [chap. 

and morbidly self-analytical, the other Rosalind and Helen, 
which he finished afterwards in Italy. Of the second of 
these compositions he entertained a poor opinion ; nor 
will it bear comparison with his best work. To his biog- 
rapher its chief interest consists in the character of Lio- 
nel, drawn less perhaps exactly from himself than as an 
ideal of the man he would have wished to be. The poet 
in Alastor, Laon in the Revolt of Islam, Lionel in Rosa- 
lind and Helen, and Prince Athanase, are in fact a re- 
markable row of self-portraits, varying in the tone and scale 
of idealistic treatment bestowed upon them. Later on in 
life, Shelley outgrew this preoccupation with his idealized 
self, and directed his genius to more objective themes. Yet 
the autobiographic tendency, as befitted a poet of the high- 
est lyric type, remained to the end a powerful characteristic. 
Before quitting the first period of Shelley's develop- 
ment, it may be well to set before the reader a specimen 
of that self-delineative poetry which characterized it ; and 
since it is difficult to detach a single passage from the con- 
tinuous stanzas of Laon and Cythna, I have chosen the 
lines in Rosalind and Helen which describe young Lionel : 

To Lionel, 
Though of great wealth and lineage high, 
Yet through those dungeon walls there came 
Thy thrilling light, Liberty ! 
And as the meteor's midnight flame 
Startles the dreamer, sun-like truth 
Flashed on his visionary youth, 
And filled him, not with love, but faith, 
And hope, and courage mute in death ; 
For love and life in him were twins, 
Born at one birth : in every other 
First life, then love its course begins, 
Though they be children of one mother ; 



v.] LIFE AT HARLOW. 99 

And so through this dark world they fleet 

Divided, till in death they meet : 

But he loved all things ever. Then 

He past amid the strife of men, 

And stood at the throne of armed power 

Pleading for a world of woe : 

Secure as one on a rock-built tower 

O'er the wrecks which the surge trails to and fro, 

'Mid the passions wild of human kind 

He stood, like a spirit calming them ; 

For, it was said, his words could find 

Like music the lulled crowd, and stem 

That torrent of unquiet dream, 

Which mortals truth and reason deem, 

But is revenge and fear and pride. 

Joyous he was ; and hope and peace 

On all who heard him did abide, 

Raining like dew from his sweet talk, 

As where the evening star may walk 

Along the brink of the gloomy seas, 

Liquid mists of splendour quiver. 

His very gestures touch'd to tears 

The unpersuaded tyrant, never 

So moved before : his presence stung 

The torturers with their victim's pain, 

And none knew how ; and through their ears, 

The subtle witchcraft of his tongue 

Unlocked the hearts of those who keep 

Gold, the world's bond of slavery. 

Men wondered, and some sneer'd to see 

One sow what he could never reap : 

For he is rich, they said, and young, 

And might drink from the depths of luxury. 

If he seeks Fame, Fame never crown'd 

The champion of a trampled creed : 

If he seeks Power, Power is enthroned 

'Mid ancient rights and wrongs, to feed 

Which hungry wolves with praise and spoil, 

Those who would sit near Power must toil ; 

And such, there sitting, all may see. 



_^___ 



100 SHELLEY. [chap., 

During the year he spent at Marlow, Shelley was a 
frequent visitor at Leigh Hunt's Hampstead house, where 
he made acquaintance with Keats, and the brothers Smith, 
authors of Rejected Addresses. Hunt's recollections sup-, 
ply some interesting details, which, since Hogg and Pea- 
cock fail us at this period, may be profitably used. De- 
scribing the manner of his life at Marlow, Hunt writes 
as follows : " He rose early in the morning, walked and 
read before breakfast, took that meal sparingly, wrote and 
studied the greater part of the morning, walked and read 
again, dined on vegetables (for he took neither meat nor 
wine), conversed with his friends (to whom his house was 
ever open), again walked out, and usually finished with 
reading to his wife till ten o'clock, when he went to bed. 
This was his daily existence. His book was generally 
Plato, or Homer, or one of the Greek tragedians, or the 
Bible, in which last he took a great, though peculiar, and 
often admiring interest. One of his favourite parts was 
the book of Job." Mrs. Shelley, in her note on the Revolt 
of Islam, confirms this account of his Bible studies ; and 
indeed the influence of the Old Testament upon his style 
may be traced in several of his poems. In the same para- 
graph from which I have just quoted, Leigh Hunt gives 
a just notion of his relation to Christianity, pointing out 
that he drew a distinction between the Pauline presenta- 
tion of the Christian creeds, and the spirit of the Gospels. 
" His want of faith in the letter, and his exceeding faith 
in the spirit of Christianity, formed a comment, the one 
on the other, very formidable to those who chose to forget 
what Scripture itself observes on that point." We have 
only to read Shelley's Essay on Christianity, in order to 
perceive what reverent admiration he felt for Jesus, and 
how profoundly he understood the true character of his 



v.] LIFE AT MARLOW. 101 

teaching. That work, brief as it is, forms one of the most 
valuable extant contributions to a sound theology, and iii 
morally far in advance of the opinions expressed by many 
who regard themselves as specially qualified to speak on 
the subject. It is certain that, as Christianity passes be- 
yond its mediaeval phase, and casts aside the husk of out- 
worn dogmas, it will more and more approximate to Shel- 
ley's exposition. Here and -here only is a vital faith, 
adapted to the conditions of modern thought, indestructi- 
ble because essential, and fitted to unite instead of sepa- 
rating minds of divers quality. It may sound paradoxical 
to claim for Shelley of all men a clear insight into the 
enduring element of the Christian creed; but it was pre- 
cisely his detachment from all its accidents which enabled 
him to discern its spiritual purity, and placed him in a 
true relation to its Founder. For those who would nei- 
ther on the one hand relinquish what is permanent in 
religion, nor yet on the other deny the inevitable con- 
clusions of modern thought, his teaching is indubitably 
valuable. His fierce tirades against historic Christianity 
must be taken as directed against an ecclesiastical system 
of spiritual tyranny, hypocrisy, and superstition, which in 
his opinion had retarded the growth of free institutions, 
and fettered the human intellect. Like Campanella, he 
distinguished between Christ, who sealed the gospel of 
charity with his blood, and those Christians, who would 
be the first to crucify their Lord if he returned to earth. 

That Shelley lived up to his religious creed is amply 
proved. To help the needy and to relieve the sick, seem- 
ed to him a simple duty, which he cheerfully discharged. 
" His charity, though liberal, was not weak. He inquired 
personally into the circumstances of his petitioners, visited 
the sick in their beds, .... and kept a regular list of 



102 SHELLEY. [chap. 

industrious poor, whom he assisted with small sums to 
make up their accounts." At Marlow, the miserable con-, 
dition of the lace-makers called forth all his energies ; and 
Mrs. Shelley tells us that an acute ophthalmia, from which 
he twice suffered, was contracted in a visit to their cot- 
tages. A story told by Leigh Hunt about his finding a 
woman ill on Hampstead Heath, and carrying her from 
door to door in the vain hopes of meeting with a man as 
charitable as himself, until he had to house the poor creat- 
ure with his friends the Hunts, reads like a practical il- 
lustration of Christ's parable about the Good Samaritan. 
Nor was it merely to the so-called poor that Shelley show- 
ed his generosity. His purse was always open to his 
friends. Peacock received from him an annual allowance 
of 100/. He gave Leigh Hunt, on one occasion, 1400/. ; 
and he discharged debts of Godwin, amounting, it is said, 
to about 6000/. In his pamphlet on Putting Reform to 
the Vote, he offered to subscribe 100/. for the purpose of 
founding an association ; and we have already seen that 
he headed the Tremadoc subscription with a sum of 500/. 
These instances of his generosity might be easily multi- 
plied; and when we remember that his present income 
was 1000/., out of which 200/. went to the support of his 
children, it will be understood not only that he could not 
live luxuriously, but also that he was in frequent money 
difficulties through the necessity of raising funds upon his 
expectations. His self-denial in all minor matters of ex- 
penditure was conspicuous. Without a murmur, without 

ostentation, this heir of the richest baronet in Sussex illus- 

. . . I 

trated by his own conduct those principles of democratic 

simplicity and of fraternal charity which formed his polit- 
ical and social creed. 

A glimpse into the cottage at Great Marlow is afforded 



v.] LIFE AT MARLOW. 103 

by a careless sentence of Leigh Hunt's. " He used to sit 
in a study adorned with casts, as large as life, of the 
Vatican Apollo and the celestial Venus." Fancy Shelley 
with his bright eyes and elf-locks in a tiny, low-roofed 
room, correcting proofs of Laon and Cythna, between the 
Apollo of the Belvedere and the Venus de' Medici, life- 
sized, and as crude as casts by Shout could make them ! 
In this house, Miss Clairmont, with her brother and Aile- 
gra, lived as Shelley's guests ; and here Clara Shelley was 
born on the 3rd of September, 1817. In the same au- 
tumn, Shelley suffered from a severe pulmonary attack. 
The critical state of his health, and the apprehension, 
vouched for by Mrs. Shelley, that the Chancellor might 
lay his vulture's talons on the children of his second mar- 
riage, were the motives which induced him to leave Eng- 
land for Italy in the spring of 1818. 1 He never returned. 
Four years only of life were left to him — years filled with 
music that will sound as long as English lasts. 

It was on the 11th of March that the Shelley s took 
their departure with Miss Clairmont and the child Allegra. 
They went straight to Milan, and after visiting the Lake 
of Como, Pisa, the Bagni di Lucca, Venice, and Rome, 
they settled early in the following December at Naples. 
Shelley's letters to Peacock form the invaluable record of 
this period of his existence. Taken altogether, they are 
the most perfect specimens of descriptive prose in the 
English language ; never over-charged with colour, vibrat- 
ing with emotions excited by the stimulating scenes of 
Italy, frank in criticism, and exquisitely delicate in obser- 
vation.- Their transparent sincerity and unpremeditated 
grace, combined with natural finish of expression, make 

1 See Note on Poems of 1819, and compare the lyric " The billows 
on the beach." 



104 SHELLEY. [chap. 

tliem masterpieces of a style at once familiar and elevated. 
That Shelley's sensibility to art was not so highly culti- 
vated as his feeling for nature, is clear enough in many 
passages : but there is no trace of admiring to order in his 
comments upon pictures or statues. Familiarity with the 
great works of antique and Italian art would doubtless 
have altered some of the opinions he at first expressed ; 
just as longer residence among the people made him mod- 
ify his views about their character. Meanwhile, the spirit 
of modest and unprejudiced attention in which he began 
his studies of sculpture and painting, might well be imi- 
tated in the present day by travellers who think that to 
pin their 'faith to some famous critic's verdict is the acme 
of good taste. If there were space for a long quotation 
from these letters, I should choose the description of Pom- 
peii (Jan. 26, 1819, or that of the Baths of Caracalla 
(March 23, 1819). As it is, I must content myself with a 
short but eminently characteristic passage, written from 
Ferrara, Nov. 7, 1818 : — 

The handwriting of Ariosto is a small, firm, and pointed character, 
expressing, as I should say, a strong and keen, but circumscribed 
energy of mind ; that of Tasso is large, free, and flowing, except that 
there is a checked expression in the midst of its flow, which brings 
the letters into a smaller compass than one expected from the begin- 
ning of the word. It is the symbol of an intense and earnest mind, 
exceeding at times its own depth, and admonished to return by the 
dullness of the waters of oblivion striking upon its adventurous feet. 
You know I always seek in what I see the manifestation of something 
beyond the present and tangible object ; and as we do not agree in 
physiognomy, so we may not agree now. But my business is to re- 
late my own sensations, and not to attempt to inspire others with 
them. 

In the middle of August, Shelley left his wife at the 
Bagni di Lucca, and paid a visit to Lord Byron at Venice. 



v.] LIFE AT HARLOW. 105 

He arrived at midnight in a thunderstorm. Julian and 
Maddalo was the literary fruit of this excursion — a poem 
which has rightly been characterized by Mr. Rossetti as 
the most perfect specimen in our language of the "poet- 
ical treatment of ordinary things." The description of a 
Venetian sunset, touched to sadness amid all its splendour 
by the gloomy presence of the madhouse, ranks among 
Shelley's finest word-paintings; while the glimpse of 
Byron's life is interesting on a lower level. Here is the 
picture of the sunset and the island of San Lazzaro : — 

Oh! 
How beautiful is sunset, when the glow 
Of heaven descends upon a land like thee, 
Thou paradise of exiles, Italy, 
Thy mountains, seas, and vineyards, and the towers 
Of cities they encircle ! — It was ours 
To stand on thee, beholding it : and then, 
Just where we had dismounted, the Count's men 
Were waiting for us with the gondola. 
As those who pause on some delightful way, 
Though bent on pleasant pilgrimage, we stood 
Looking upon the evening, and the flood 
Which lay between the city and the shore, 
Paved with the image of the sky. The hoar 
And airy Alps, towards the north, appeared, 
Thro' mist, a heaven-sustaining bulwark, reared 
Between the east and west ; and half the sky 
Was roofed with clouds of rich emblazonry, 
Dark purple at the zenith, which still grew 
Down the steep west into a wondrous hue 
Brighter than burning gold, even to the rent 
Where the swift sun yet paused in his descent 
Among the many-folded hills. They were 
Those famous Euganean hills, which bear, 
As seen from Lido through the harbour piles, 
The likeness of a clump of peaked isles — 



106 SHELLEY. [chap. 

And then, as if the earth and sea had been 

Dissolved into one lake of fire, were seen 

Those mountains towering, as from waves of flame, 

Around the vaporous sun, from which there came 

The inmost purple spirit of light, and made 

Their very peaks transparent. " Ere it fade," 

Said my companion, " I will show you soon 

A better station." So, o'er the lagune 

"We glided ; and from that funereal bark 

I leaned, and saw the city, and could mark 

How from their many isles, in evening's gleam, 

Its temples and its palaces did seem 

Like fabrics of enchantment piled to heaven. 

I was about to speak, when — " We are even 

Now at the point I meant," said Maddalo, 

And bade the gondolieri cease to row. 

" Look, Julian, on the west, and listen well 

If you hear not a deep and heavy bell." 

I looked, and saw between us and the sun 

A building on an island, such a one 

As age to age might add, for uses vile, — 

A windowless, deformed, and dreary pile ; 

And on the top an open tower, where hung 

A bell, which in the radiance swayed and swung, — 

We could just hear its coarse and iron tongue : 

The broad sun sank behind it, and it tolled 

In strong and black relief — " What we behold 

Shall be the madhouse and its belfry tower," — 

Said Maddalo ; " and ever at this hour, 

Those who may cross the water hear that bell, 

Which calls the maniacs, each one from his cell, 

To vespers." 

It may be parenthetically observed that one of the few 
familiar quotations from Shelley's poems occurs in Julian 

and Maddalo : — 

Most wretched men 
Are cradled into poetry by wrong : 
They learn in suffering what they teach in song. 



v.] ITALY 107 

Byron lent the Shelleys his villa of the Cappuccini near 
Este, where they spent some weeks in the autumn. Here 
Prometheus Unbound was begun, and the Lines written 
among Euganean Hills were composed ; and here Clara 
became so ill that her parents thought it necessary to rush 
for medical assistance to Venice. They had forgotten 
their passport ; but Shelley's irresistible energy overcame 
all difficulties, and they entered Venice — only in time, 
however, for the child to die. 

Nearly the whole of the winter was spent in Naples, 
where Shelley suffered from depression of in Ore than or- 
dinary depth. Mrs. Shelley attributed this gloom to the 
state of his health ; but Medwin tells a strange story, 
which, if it is not wholly a romance, may better account 
for the poet's melancholy. He says that so far back as 
the year 1816, on the night before his departure from 
London, " a married lady, young, handsome, and of noble 
connexions," came to him, avowed the passionate love she 
had conceived for him, and proposed that they should fly 
together. 1 He explained to her that his hand and heart 
had both been given irrevocably to another, and, after the 
expression of the most exalted sentiments on both sides, 
they parted. She followed him, however, from place to 
place ; and without intruding herself upon his notice, 
found some consolation in remaining near him. Now she 
arrived at Naples; and at Naples she died. The web of 
Shelley's life was a wide one, and included more destinies 
than his own. Godwin, as we have reason to believe, at- 
tributed the suicide of Fanny Imlay to her hopeless love 
for Shelley ; and the tale of Harriet has been already told. 
Therefore there is nothing absolutely improbable in Med- 

1 Medwin's Life of Shelley, vol. i. 324. His date, 1814, appears 
from the context to be a misprint. 



108 SHELLEY. [chap. 

win's story, especially when we remember what Hogg half- 
humorously tells us about Shelley's attraction for women 
in London. At any rate, the excessive wretchedness of 
the lyrics written at Naples can hardly be accounted for 
by the " constant and poignant physical sufferings " of 
which Mrs. Shelley speaks, since these were habitual to 
him. She was herself, moreover, under the impression 
that he was concealing something from her, and we know 
from her own words in another place that his "fear to 
wound the feelings of others " often impelled him to keep 
his deepest sorrows to himself. 1 

All this while his health was steadily improving. The 
menace of consumption was removed ; and though he suf- 
fered from severe attacks of pain in the side, the cause of 
this persistent malady does not seem to have been ascer- 
tained. At Naples he was under treatment for disease of 
the liver. Afterwards, his symptoms were ascribed to ne- 
phritis ; and it is certain that his greater or less freedom 
from uneasiness varied with the quality of the water he 
drank. He was, for instance, forced to eschew the drink- 
ing water of Ravenna, because it aggravated his symptoms; 
while Florence, for a similar reason, proved an unsuitable 
residence. The final settlement of the Shelley s at Pisa 
seems to have been determined by the fact that the water 
of that place agreed with him. That the spasms which 
from time to time attacked him were extremely serious, 
is abundantly proved by the testimony of those who lived 
w 7 ith him at this period, and by his own letters. Some 
relief was obtained by mesmerism, a remedy suggested by 
Medwin ; but the obstinacy of the torment preyed upon 
his spirits to such an extent, that even during the last 
months of his life we find him begging Trelawny to pro* 
1 Note on the Revolt of Islam. 



v.] ITALY. 109 

cure him prussic acid as a final and effectual remedy for all 
the ills that flesh is heir to. It may be added that mental 
application increased the mischief, for he told Leigh Hunt 
that the composition of The Cenci had cost him a fresh 
seizure. Yet though his sufferings were indubitably real, 
the eminent physician, Vacca, could discover no organic 
disease ; and possibly Trelawny came near the truth when 
he attributed Shelley's spasms to insufficient and irregular 
diet, and to a continual over-taxing of his nervous system. 
Mrs. Shelley states that the change from England to 
Italy was in all respects beneficial to her husband. She 
was inclined to refer the .depression from which he occa- 
sionally suffered, to his solitary habits ; and there are sev- 
eral passages in his own letters which connect his melan- 
choly with solitude. It is obvious that when he found 
himself in the congenial company of Trelawny, Williams, 
Med win, or the Gisbornes, he was simply happy ; and 
nothing could be further from the truth than to paint 
him as habitually sunk in gloom. On the contrary, we 
hear quite as much about his high spirits, his " Homeric 
laughter," his playfulness with children, his readiness to 
join in the amusements of his chosen circle, and his in- 
comparable conversation, as we do about his solitary 
broodings, and the seasons when pain or bitter memories 
over-cast his heaven. Byron, who had some right to ex- 
press a judgment in such a matter, described him as the 
most companionable man under the age of thirty he had 
ever met with. Shelley rode and practised pistol-shoot- 
ing with his brother bard, sat up late to talk with him, 
enjoyed his jokes, and even betted with him on one occa- 
sion marked by questionable taste. All this is quite in- 
compatible with that martyrdom to persecution, remorse, 
or physical suffering, with which it has pleased some ro- 



110 SHELLEY. [chap. 

mantic persons to invest the poet. Society of the ordi- 
nary kind he hated. The voice of a stranger, or a ring 
at the house-bell, heard from afar with Shelley's almost 
inconceivable quickness of perception,- was enough to 
make him leave the house; and one of his prettiest po- 
ems is written on his mistaking his wife's mention of the 
Aziola, a little owl common enough in Tuscany, for an al- 
lusion to a tiresome visitor. This dislike for intercourse 
with commonplace people was the source of some disa- 
greement between him and Mrs. Shelley, and kept him 
further apart from Byron than he might otherwise have 
been. In a valuable letter recently published by Mr. 
Garnett, he writes : — " I detest all society — almost all, at 
least — and Lord Byron is the nucleus of all that is hate- 
ful and tiresome in it." And again, speaking about his 
wife to Trelawny, he said : — " She can't bear solitude, nor 
I society — the quick coupled with the dead." 

In the year 1818-19 the Shelleys had no friends at all 
in Italy, except Lord Byron at Venice, and Mr. and Mrs. 
John Gisborne at Leghorn. Mrs. Gisborne had been a 
friend of Mary Wollstonecraft and Godwin. She was a 
woman of much cultivation, devoid of prejudice, and, 
though less enthusiastic than Shelley liked, quite capable 
of appreciating the inestimable privilege of his acquaint- 
ance. Her husband, to use a now almost obsolete phrase, 
was a scholar and a gentleman. He shared his wife's 
enlightened opinions, and remained stanch through good 
and ill report to his new friends. At Rome and Naples 
they knew absolutely no one. Shelley's time was there- 
fore passed in study and composition. In the previous 
summer he had translated the Symposium of Plato, and 
begun an essay on the Ethics of the Greeks, which re- 
mains unluckily a fragment. Together with Mary he 



v.] ITALY. Ill 

read much Italian literature, and his observations on the 
chief Italian poets form a valuable contribution to their 
criticism. While he admired the splendour and inven- 
tion of Ariosto, he could not tolerate his moral tone. 
Tasso struck him as cold and artificial, in spite of his 
" delicate moral sensibility." Boccaccio he preferred to 
both; and his remarks on this prose -poet are extreme- 
ly characteristic. " How much do I admire Boccaccio ! 
What descriptions of nature are those -in his little intro- 
ductions to every new day ! It is the morning of life 
stripped of that mist of familiarity which makes it ob- 
scure to us. Boccaccio seems to me to have possessed a 
deep sense of the fair ideal of human life, considered in 
its social relations. His more serious theories of love 
agree especially with mine. He often expresses things 
lightly too, which have serious meanings of a very beau- 
tiful kind. He is a moral casuist, the opposite of the 
Christian, stoical, ready-made, and worldly system of 
morals. Do you remember one little remark, or rather 
maxim of his, which might do some good to the common, 
narrow-minded conceptions of love, — 'Bocca baciata non 
perde ventura; anzi rinnuova, come fa la luna'?" Dante 
and Petrarch remained the objects of his lasting admira- 
tion, though the cruel Christianity of the Inferno seemed 
to him an ineradicable blot upon the greatest of Italian 
poems. Of Petrarch's " tender and solemn enthusiasm," 
he speaks with the sympathy of one who understood the 
inner mysteries of idealizing love. 

It will be gathered from the foregoing quotations that 
Shelley, notwithstanding his profound study of style and 
his exquisite perception of beauty in form and rhythm, 
required more than merely artistic excellences in poetry. 
He judged poems by their content and spirit; and while 



112 SHELLEY. [chap. 

he plainly expressed his abhorrence of the didactic man- 
ner, he held that art must be moralized in order to be 
truly great. The distinction he drew between Theocritus 
and the earlier Greek singers in the Defence of Poetry, his 
severe strictures on The Two Noble Kinsmen in a letter 
to Mary (Aug. 20, 1818), and his phrase about Ariosto, 
" who is entertaining and graceful, and sometimes a poet," 
illustrate the application of critical canons wholly at vari- 
ance with the " art for art " doctrine. 

While studying Italian, he continued faithful to Greek. 
Plato was often in his hands, and the dramatists formed 
his almost inseparable companions. How deeply he felt 
the art of the Homeric poems, may be gathered from the 
following extract : — " I congratulate you on your conquest 
of the Iliad. You must have been astonished at the per- 
petually increasing magnificence of the last seven books. 
Homer there truly begins to be himself. The battle of 
the Scamander, the funeral of Patroclus, and the high and 
solemn close of the whole bloody tale in tenderness and 
inexpiable sorrow, are wrought in a manner incomparable 
with anything of the same kind. The Odyssey is sweet, 
but there is nothing like this." About this time, prompt- 
ed by Mrs. Gisborne, he began the study of Spanish, and 
conceived an ardent admiration for Calderon, whose splen- 
did and supernatural fancy tallied with his own. "I am 
bathing myself in the light and odour of the starry Au- 
tos," he writes to Mr. Gisborne in the autumn of 1820. 
Faust, too, was a favourite. " I have been reading over 
and over again Faust, and always with sensations which 
no other composition excites. It deepens the gloom and 
augments the rapidity of ideas, and would therefore seem 
to me an unfit study for any person who is a prey to the 
reproaches of memory, and the delusions of an imagina- 



v.] ITALY. 113 

tion not to be restrained." The profound impression 
made upon him by Margaret's story is expressed in two 
letters about Retzsch's illustrations : — " The artist makes 
one envy his happiness that he can sketch such things 
with calmness, which I only dared look upon once, and 
Avhich made my brain swim round only to touch the leaf 
on the opposite side of which I knew that it was figured." 
(^The fruits of this occupation with Greek, Italian, Span- 
ish, and German were Shelley's translations from Homer 
aud Euripides, from Dante, from Calderon's Magico Pro- 
digioso, and from Faust, translations which have never 
been surpassed for beauty of form and complete transfu- 
sion of the spirit of ODe literature into the language of 
anotherj On translation, however, he set but little store, 
asserting that he only undertook it when he " could do 
absolutely nothing else," and writing earnestly to dissuade 
Leigh Hunt from devoting time which might be better 
spent, to work of subordinate importance. 1 The follow- 
ing version of a Greek epigram on Plato's spirit will illus- 
trate his own method of translation : — 

Eagle ! why soarest thou above that tomb ? 
To what sublime and star-y-paven home 

Floatest thou ? 
I am the image of swift Plato's spirit, 
Ascending heaven: — Athens does inherit 

His corpse below. 

Some time in the year 1820-21, he composed the De- 
fence of Poetry, stimulated to this undertaking by his 
friend Peacock's article on poetry, published in the Liter- 
ary Miscellany? This essay not only sets forth his theo- 
ry of his own art, but it also contains some of his finest 

1 Letter from Florence, Nov., 1819. 

2 See Letter to Oilier, Jan. 20, 1820, Shelley Memorials, p. 135. 

6 



114 SHELLEY. [chap. 

prose writing, of which the following passage, valuable 
alike for matter and style, may be cited as a specimen : — 

The functions of the poetical faculty are two-fold ; by one it cre- 
ates new materials of knowledge, and power, and pleasure ; by the 
other it engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange 
them according to a certain rhythm and order which may be called 
the beautiful and the good. The cultivation of poetry is never more 
to be desired than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and 
calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials of external 
life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the in- 
ternal laws of human nature. The body has then become too un- 
wieldy for that which animates it. 

Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and 
circumference of knowledge ; it is that which comprehends all sci- 
ence, and that to which all science must be referred. It is at the 
same time the root and blossom of all other systems of thought ; it 
is that from which all spring, and that which adorns all ; and that 
which, if blighted, denies the fruit and the seed, and withholds from 
the barren world the nourishment and the succession of the scions of 
the tree of life. It is the perfect and consummate surface and bloom 
of all things ; it is as the odour and the colour of the rose to the 
texture of the elements which compose it, as the form and splendour 
of unfaded beauty to the secrets of anatomy and corruption. What 
were virtue, love, patriotism, friendship — what were the scenery of 
this beautiful universe which we inhabit — what were our consola- 
tions on this side of the grave — and what were our aspirations be- 
yond it, if poetry did not ascend to bring light and fire from those 
eternal regions where the owl-winged faculty of calculation dare not 
ever soar ? Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted ac- 
cording to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, "I 
will compose poetry." The greatest poet even cannot say it; for 
the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influ- 
ence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness ; this 
power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and 
changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures 
are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure. Could this 
influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible 
to predict the greatness of the results ; but when composition begins, 



t.] ITALY. 115 

inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry ( 
that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble 
shadow of the original conceptions of the poet. I appeal to the 
greatest poets of the present day, whether it is not an error to assert 
that the finest passages of poetry are produced by labour and study. 
The toil and the delay recommended by critics, can be justly inter- 
preted to mean no more than a careful observation of the inspired 
moments, and an artificial connexion of the spaces between their 
suggestions by the intermixture of conventional expressions ; a ne- 
cessity only imposed by the limitedness of the poetical faculty itself ; 
for Milton conceived the " Paradise Lost " as a whole before he exe- 
cuted it in portions. We have his own authority also for the muse 
having " dictated " to him the " unpremeditated song." And let this 
be an answer to those who would allege the fifty-six various read- 
ings of the first line of the "Orlando Furioso." Compositions so 
produced are to poetry what mosaic is to painting. This instinct 
and intuition of the poetical faculty is still more observable in the 
plastic and pictorial arts ; a great statue or picture grows under the 
power of the artist as a child in the mother's Avomb ; and the very 
mind which directs the hands in formation is incapable of accounting 
to itself for the origin, the gradations, or the media of the process. 

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the 
happiest and best minds. We are aware of evanescent visitations 
of thought and feeling sometimes associated with place or person, 
sometimes regarding our own mind alone, and always arising unfore- 
seen and departing unbidden, but elevating and delightful beyond 
all expression : so that even in the desire and the regret they leave, 
there cannot but be pleasure, participating as it does in the nature of 
its object. It is as it were the interpenetration of a diviner nature 
through our own ; but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the 
sea, which the coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only, as 
on the wrinkled sand which paves it. These and corresponding con- 
ditions of being are experienced principally by those of the most del- 
icate sensibility and the most enlarged imagination ; and the state 
of mind produced by them is at war with every base desire. The 
enthusiasm of virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship, is essentially 
linked with such emotions; and whilst- they last, self appears as 
what it is, an atom to a universe. Poets are not only subject to 
these experiences as spirits of the most refined organization, but 



116 SHELLEY. [chap. 

they can colour all that they combine with the evanescent hues of 
this ethereal world ; a word, a trait in the representation of a scene 
or a passion, will touch the enchanted chord, and reanimate, in those 
who have ever experienced these emotions, the sleeping, the cold, the 
buried image of the past. Poetry thus makes immortal all that is 
best and most beautiful in the world ; it arrests the vanishing appa- 
ritions which haunt the interlunations of life, and veiling them, or 
in language or in form, sends them forth among mankind, bearing 
sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom their sisters abide — 
abide, because there is no portal of expression from the caverns of 
the spirit which they inhabit into the universe of things. Poetry re- 
deems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man. 

In the midst of these aesthetic studies, and while pro- 
ducing his own greatest works, Shelley was not satisfied 
that his genius ought to be devoted to poetry. " I con- 
sider poetry," he wrote to Peacock, January 26th, 1819, 
" very subordinate to moral and political science, and if I 
were well, certainly I would aspire to the latter ; for I can 
conceive a great work, embodying the discoveries of all 
ages, and harmonizing the contending creeds by which 
mankind have been ruled. Far from me is such an at- 
tempt, and I shall be content, by exercising my fancy, to 
amuse myself, and perhaps some others, and cast what 
weight I can into the scale of that balance which the 
Giant of Arthegall holds." Whether he was right in the 
conviction that his genius was no less fitted for metaphys- 
ical speculation or for political science than for poetry, is 
a question that admits of much debate. 1 We have noth- 
ing but fragments whereby to form a definite opinion — 
the unfinished Defence of Poetry, the unfinished Essay on 
a Future State, the unfinished Essay on Christianity, the 
unfinished Essay on the Punishment of Death, and the 

1 See Mrs. Shelley's note on the Revolt of Islam, and the whole 
Preface to the Prose Works. 



v.] ITALY. 117 

scattered Speculations on Metaphysics. None of these 
compositions justify the belief so confidently expressed by 
Mrs. Shelley in her Preface to the prose works, that " had 
not Shelley deserted metaphysics for poetry in his youth, 
and had he not been lost to us early, so that all his vaster 
projects were wrecked with him in the waves, he would 
have presented the world with a complete theory of mind ; 
a theory to which Berkeley, Coleridge, and Kant would 
have contributed ; but more simple, un impugnable, and 
entire than the systems of these writers." Their incom- 
pleteness rather tends to confirm what she proceeds to 
state, that the strain of philosophical composition was too 
great for his susceptible nerves ; while her further obser- 
vation that "thought kindled imagination and awoke sen- 
sation, and rendered him dizzy from too great keenness of 
emotion," seems to indicate that his nature was primarily 
that of a poet deeply tinctured with philosophical specula- 
tion, rather than that of a metaphysician warmed at inter- 
vals to an imaginative fervour. Another of her remarks 
confirms us in this opinion. " He considered these phil- 
osophical views of mind and nature to be instinct with 
the intensest spirit of poetry." 1 This is the position of 
the poet rather than the analyst ; and, on the whole, we 
are probably justified in concluding with Mrs. Shelley, 
that he followed a true instinct when he dedicated himself 
to poetry, and trained his powers in that direction. 2 To 
dogmatize upon the topic would be worse than foolish. 
There was something incalculable, incommensurable, and 
daemonic in Shelley's genius ; and what he might have 
achieved, had his life been spared and had his health pro- 
gressively improved, it is of course impossible to say. 

1 Note on Prometheus. 

2 Note on Revolt of Islam. 



118 SHELLEY. [chap. 

In the spring of 1819 the Shelley s settled in Rome, 
where the poet proceeded with the composition of Pro- 
metheus Unbound. He used to write among the ruins 
of the Baths of Caracalla, not then, as now, despoiled of 
all their natural beauty, but waving with the Paradise of 
flowers and shrubs described in his incomparable letter of 
March the 23rd to Peacock. Rome, however, was not 
destined to retain them long. On the 7th of June they 
lost their son William after a short illness. Shelley loved 
this child intensely, and sat by his bedside for sixty hours 
without taking rest. He was now practically childless ; 
and his grief found expression in many of his poems, es- 
pecially in the fragment headed " Roma, Roma, Roma! 
non e piu com 7 era p?'ima." William was buried in the 
. Protestant cemetery, of which Shelley had written a de- 
scription to Peacock in the previous December. " The 
English burying-place is a green slope near the walls, un- 
der the pyramidal tomb of Cestius, and is, I think, the 
most beautiful and solemn cemetery I ever beheld. To 
see the sun shining on its bright grass, fresh, when we 
first visited it, with the autumnal dews, and hear the whis- 
pering of the wind among the" leaves of the trees which 
have overgrown the tomb of Cestius, and the soil which 
is stirring in the sun-warm earth, and to mark the tombs, 
mostly of women and young people who were buried 
there, one might, if one were to die, desire the sleep they 
seem to sleep. Such is the human mind, and so it peo- 
ples with its wishes vacancy and oblivion." 

Escaping from the scene of so much sorrow, they estab- 
lished themselves at the Villa Valsovano, near Leghorn. 
Here Shelley began and finished The Cenci at the instance 
of his wife, who rightly thought that he undervalued his 
own powers as a dramatic poet. The supposed portrait 



v.] ITALY. 119 

of Beatrice in the Barberini Palace had powerfully affect- 
ed his imagination, and he fancied that her story would 
form the fitting subject for a tragedy. It is fortunate 
for English literature that the real facts of that domestic 
drama, as recently published by Signor Bertolotti, were 
then involved in a tissue of romance and legend. During 
this summer he saw a great deal of the Gisborne family. 
Mrs. Gisborne' s son by a previous marriage, Henry Reve- 
ley, was an engineer, and Shelley conceived a project of 
helping him to build a steamer which should ply between 
Leghorn and Marseilles. He was to supply the funds, 
and the pecuniary profit was to be shared by the Gisborne 
family. The scheme eventually fell through, though Shel- 
ley spent a good deal of money upon it; and its only im- 
portance is the additional light it throws upon his pub- 
lic and private benevolence. From Leghorn the Shelleys 
removed in the autumn to Florence, where, on the 12th 
of November, the present Sir Percy Florence Shelley was 
born. Here Shelley wrote the last act of Prometheus 
Unbound, which, though the finest portion of that unique 
drama, seems to have been an afterthought. In the Cas- 
cine outside Florence he also composed the Ode to the 
West Wind, the most symmetrically perfect as well as the 
most impassioned of his minor lyrics. He spent much 
time in the galleries, made notes upon the principal an- 
tique statues, and formed a plan of systematic art-study. 
The climate, however, disagreed with him, and in the 
month of January, 1820, they took up their abode at Pisa. 
1819 was the most important year in Shelley's life, so 
far as literary production is concerned. Besides The Cen- 
ci and Prometheus Unbound, of which it yet remains to 
speak, this year saw the production of several political and 
satirical poems — the Masque of Anarchy, suggested by the 



120 SHELLEY. [chap. 

news of the Peterloo massacre, being by far the most im- 
portant. Shelley attempted the composition of short pop- 
ular songs which should stir the English people to a sense 
of what he felt to be their degradation. But he lacked 
the directness which alone could make such verses forci- 
ble, and the passionate apostrophe to the Men of England 
in his Masque of Anarchy marks the highest point of his 
achievement in this style : — 

Men of England, Heirs of Glory, 
Heroes of unwritten story, 
Nurslings of one mighty mother, 
Hopes of her, and one another ! 

Rise, like lions after slumber, 
In unvanquishable number, 
Shake your chains to earth like dew, 
Which in sleep had fall'n on you. 
Ye are many, they are few. 

Peter Bell the Third, written in this year, and Swell- 
foot the Tyrant, composed in the following autumn, are 
remarkable as showing with what keen interest Shelley 
watched public affairs in England from his exile home ; 
but, for my own part, I cannot agree with those critics who 
esteem their humour at a high rate. The political poems 
may profitably be compared with his contemporary cor- 
respondence ; with the letters, for instance, to Leigh Hunt, 
November 23rd, 1819; and to Mr. John Gisborne, April 
10th, 1822 ; and with an undated fragment published by 
Mr. Garnett in the Relics of Shelley, page 84. No stu- 
dent of English political history before the Keform Bill 
can regard his apprehensions of a great catastrophe as ill- 
founded. His insight into the real danger to the nation 
was as penetrating as his suggestion of a remedy was mod- 
erate. Those who are accustomed to think of the poet as 



v.] ITALY. 121 

a visionary enthusiast, will rub their eyes when they read 
the sober lines in which he warns his friend to be cautious 
about the security offered by the English Funds. Another 
letter, dated Lerici, June 29, 1822, illustrates the same prac- 
tical temper of mind, the same logical application of polit- 
ical principles to questions of public economy. 

That Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci should have 
been composed in one and the same year must be reck- 
oned among the greatest wonders of literature, not only be- 
cause of their sublime greatness, but also because of their 
essential difference. ^Eschylus, it is well known, had writ- 
ten a sequel to his Prometheus Bound, in which he showed 
the final reconciliation between Zeus, the oppressor, and 
Prometheus, the champion, of humanity. What that rec- 
onciliation was, we do not know, because the play is lost, 
and the fragments are too brief for supporting any prob- 
able hypothesis. But Shelley repudiated the notion of 
compromise. He could not conceive of the Titan " unsay- 
ing his high language, and quailing before his successful 
and perfidious adversary." He, therefore, approached the 
theme of liberation from a wholly different point of view. 
Prometheus in his drama is the humane vindicator of love, 
justice, and liberty, as opposed to Jove, the tyrannical op- 
pressor, and creator of all evil by his selfish rule. Prome- 
theus is the mind of man idealized, the spirit of our race, 
as Shelley thought it made to be. Jove is the incarnation 
of all that thwarts its free development. Thus counter- 
posed, the two chief actors represent the fundamental an- 
titheses of good and evil, liberty and despotism, love and 
hate. They give the form of personality to Shelley's 
Ormuzd- Ahriman dualism already expressed in the first 
canto of Laon and Cythna ; but, instead of being repre- 
sented on the theatre of human life, the strife is now re- 
*6 



122 SHELLEY. [chap. 

moved into the reign of abstractions, vivified by mythopo- 
etry. Prometheus resists Jove to the uttermost, endures 
all torments, physical and moral, that the tyrant plagues 
him with, secure in his own strength, and calmly expectant 
of an hour which shall hurl Jove from heaven, and leave 
the spirit of good triumphant. That hour arrives; Jove 
disappears ; the burdens of the world and men are sud- 
denly removed ; a new age of peace and freedom and il- 
limitable energy begins; the whole universe partakes in 
the emancipation ; the spirit of the earth no longer groans 
in pain, but sings alternate love-songs with his sister orb, 
the moon; Prometheus is re-united in indissoluble bonds 
to his old love, Asia. Asia, withdrawn from sight during 
the first act, but spoken of as waiting in her exile for the 
fated hour, is the true mate of the human spirit. She is 
the fairest daughter of Earth and Ocean. Like Aphrodite, 
she rises in the JEgean near the land called by her name ; 
and in the time of tribulation she dwells in a far Indian 
vale. She is the Idea of Beauty incarnate, the shadow of 
the Light of Life which sustains the world and enkindles 
it with love, the reality of Alastor's vision, the breathing 
image of the awful loveliness apostrophized in the Hymn 
to Intellectual Beauty, the reflex of the splendour of which 
Adonais was a part. At the moment of her triumph she 
grows so beautiful that lone her sister cannot see her, only 
feels her influence. The essential thought of Shelley's 
creed was that the universe is penetrated, vitalized, made 
real by a spirit, which he sometimes called the spirit of 
Nature, but which is always conceived as more than Life, 
as that which gives its actuality to Life, and lastly as Love 
and Beauty. To adore this spirit, to clasp it with affec- 
tion, and to blend with it, is, he thought, the true object 
of man. Therefore, the final union of Prometheus with 



v.] ITALY. 123 

Asia is the consummation of human destinies. Love was 
the only law Shelley recognized. Unterrified by the grim 
realities of pain and crime revealed in nature and society, 
he held fast to the belief that, if we could but pierce to 
the core of things, if we could but be what we might be, 
the world and man would both attain to their perfection 
in eternal love. What resolution through some transcen- 
dental harmony was expected by Shelley for the palpable 
discords in the structure of the universe, we hardly know. 
He did not give his philosophy systematic form : and his 
new science of love remains a luminous poetic vision — no- 
where more brilliantly set forth than in the " sevenfold 
hallelujahs and harping symphonies " of this, the final tri- 
umph of his lyrical poetry. 

In Prometheus, Shelley conceived a colossal work of 
art, and sketched out the main figures on a scale of sur- 
passing magnificence. While painting in these figures, he 
seems to reduce their proportions too much to the level of 
earthly life. He quits his god-creating, heaven-compelling 
throne of mythopoeic inspiration, and descends to a love- 
story of Asia and Prometheus. In other words, he does 
not sustain the visionary and primeval dignity of these in- 
carnated abstractions; nor, on the other hand, has he so 
elaborated their characters in detail as to give them the 
substantiality of persons. There is therefore something 
vague and hollow in both figures. Yet in the subordinate 
passages of the poem, the true mythopoeic faculty — the 
faculty of finding concrete forms for thought, and of in- 
vesting emotion with personality — shines forth with ex- 
traordinary force and clearness. We feel ourselves in the 
grasp of a primitive myth -maker while we read the de- 
scription of Oceanus, and the raptures of the Earth and 
Moon. 



124 SHELLEY. [chap. 

A genuine liking for Prometheus Unbound may be reck- 
oned the touch-stone of a man's capacity for understand- 
ing lyric poetry. The world in which the action is sup- 
posed to move, rings with spirit voices; and what these 
spirits sing, is melody more purged of mortal dross than 
any other poet's ear has caught, while listening to his own 
heart's song, or to the rhythms of the world. There are 
hymns in Prometheus, which seem to realize the miracle 
of making words, detached from meaning, the substance 
of a new ethereal music ; and yet, although their verbal 
harmony is such, they are never devoid of definite sig- 
nificance for those who understand. Shelley scorned the 
aesthetics of a school which finds " sense swooning into 
nonsense " admirable. And if a critic is so dull as to ask 
what "Life of Life ! thy lips enkindle " means, or to whom 
it is addressed, none can help him any more than one can 
help a man whose sense of hearing is too gross for the 
tenuity of a bat's cry. A voice in the air thus sings the 
hymn of Asia at the moment of her apotheosis : — 

Life of Life ! thy lips enkindle 

With their love the breath between them ; 

And thy smiles before they dwindle 

Make the cold air fire ; then screen them 

In those looks where whoso gazes 

Taints, entangled in their mazes. 

Child of Light ! thy limbs are burning 
Through the vest which seems to hide them, 

As the radiant lines of morning 

Through the clouds, ere they divide them ; 

And this atmosphere divinest 

Shrouds thee wheresoe'er thou shinest. 

Fair are others ; none beholds thee. 
But thy voice sounds low and tender, 



v.j ITALY. 125 

Like the fairest, for it folds thee 

From the sight, that liquid splendour, 
And all feel, yet see thee never, 
As I feel now, lost for ever ! 

Lamp of Earth ! where'er thou movest 
Its dim shapes are clad with brightness, 

And the souls of whom thou lovest 
Walk upon the winds with lightness, 

Till they fail, as I am failing, 

Dizzy, lost, yet unbewailing ! 

It has been said that Shelley, as a landscape painter, is 
decidedly Turneresque ; and there is much in Prometheus 
Unbound to justify this opinion. The scale of colour is 
light and aerial, and the darker shadows are omitted. An 
excess of luminousness seems to be continually radiated 
from the objects at which he looks ; and in this radiation 
of many -coloured lights, the outline itself is apt to be a 
little misty. Shelley, moreover, pierced through things to 
their spiritual essence. The actual world was less for him 
than that which lies within it and beyond it. " I seek," 
he says himself, "in what I see, the manifestation of some- 
thing beyond the present and tangible object." For him, 
as for the poet described by one of the spirit voices in 
Prometheus, the bees in the ivy -bloom are scarcely heed- 
ed ; they become in his mind, — 

Forms more real than living man, 
Nurslings of immortality. 

And yet who could have brought the bees, the lake, the 
sun, the bloom, more perfectly before us than that picture 
does V~ What vignette is more exquisitely coloured and 
finished than the little study of a pair of halcyons in the 

1 Forman, vol. ii. p. 181. 



126 SHELLEY. [chap. 

third act t Blake is perhaps the only artist who could 
have illustrated this drama. He might have shadowed 
forth the choirs of spirits, the trailing voices and their thrill- 
ing songs, phantasmal Demogorgon, and the charioted 
Hour. Prometheus, too, with his "flowing limbs," has 
just Blake's fault of impersonation — the touch of unreal- 
ity in that painter's Adam. 

Passing to The Cenci, we change at once the moral and 
artistic atmosphere. The lyrical element, except for one 
most lovely dirge, is absent. Imagery and description are 
alike sternly excluded. Instead of soaring to the em- 
pyrean, our feet are firmly planted on the earth. In ex- 
change for radiant visions of future perfection, we are 
brought into the sphere of dreadful passions — all the ag- 
ony, endurance, and half-maddened action, of which luck- 
less human innocence is capable. To tell the legend of 
Beatrice Cenci here, is hardly needed. Her father, a mon- 
ster of vice and cruelty, was bent upon breaking her spir- 
it by imprisonment, torture, and nameless outrage. At last 
her patience ended ; and finding no redress in human jus- 
tice, no champion of her helplessness in living man, she 
wrought his death. For this she died upon the scaffold, 
together with her step-mother and her brothers, who had 
aided in the execution of the murder. The interest of 
The Cenci, and it is overwhelmingly great, centres in Be- 
atrice and her father; from these two chief actors in the 
drama, all the other characters fall away into greater or 
less degrees of unsubstantiality. Perhaps Shelley intend- 
ed this — as the maker of a bas-relief contrives two or three 
planes of figures for the presentation of his ruling group. 
Yet there appears to my mind a defect of accomplishment, 
rather than a deliberate intention, in the delineation of Or- 

1 Formati, vol. ii. p. 231. 



v.] ITALY. 127 

sino. He seems meant to be the wily, crafty, Machiavel- 
lian reptile, whose calculating wickedness should form a 
contrast to the daemonic, reckless, almost maniacal fiend- 
ishness of old Francesco Cenci. But this conception of 
him wavers ; his love for Beatrice is too delicately tinted, 
and he is suffered to break down with an infirmity of con- 
science alien to such a nature. On the other hand the un- 
easy vacillations of Giacomo, and the irresolution, born of 
feminine weakness and want of fibre, in Lucrezia, serve to 
throw the firm will of Beatrice into prominent relief ; while 
her innocence, sustained through extraordinary suffering in 
circumstances of exceptional horror — the innocence of a 
noble nature thrust by no act of its own but by its wrongs 
beyond the pale of ordinary womankind — is contrasted 
with the merely childish guiltlessness of Bernardo. Be- 
atrice rises to her full height in the fifth act, dilates and 
grows with the approach of danger, and fills the whole 
scene with her spirit on the point of death. Her sublime 
confidence in the justice and essential rightness of her ac- 
tion, the glance of self-assured purity with which she anni- 
hilates the cut -throat brought to testify against her, her 
song in prison, and her tender solicitude for the frailer 
Lucrezia, are used with wonderful dramatic skill for the 
fulfilment of a feminine ideal at once delicate and power- 
ful. Once and once only does she yield to ordinary weak- 
ness; it is when the thought crosses her mind that she 
may meet her father in the other world, as once he came 
to her on earth. 

Shelley dedicated The Cenci to Leigh Hunt, saying that 
he had striven in this tragedy to cast aside the subjective 
manner of his earlier work, and to produce something at 
once more popular and more concrete, more sober in style, 
and with a firmer grasp on the realities of life. He was 



128 SHELLEY. [chap. 

very desirous of getting it acted, and wrote to Peacock 
requesting him to offer it at Covent Garden. Miss O'Neil, 
he thought, would play the part of Beatrice admirably. 
The manager, however, did not take this view ; averring 
that the subject rendered it incapable of being even sub- 
mitted to an actress like Miss O'Neil. Shelley's self-criti- 
cism is always so valuable, that it may be well here to 
collect what he said about the two great dramas of 1819. 
Concerning The Cenci he wrote to Peacock : — " It is writ- 
ten without any of the peculiar feelings and opinions which 
characterize my other compositions ; I having attended 
simply to the impartial development of such characters as 
it is probable the persons represented really were, together 
with the greatest degree of popular effect to be produced 
by such a development." " Cenci is written for the mul- 
titude, and ought to sell well." " I believe it singularly 
fitted for the stage." " The Cenci is a work of art ; it is 
not coloured by my feelings, nor obscured by my meta- 
physics. I don't think much of it. It gave me less 
trouble than anything I have written of the same length." 
Prometheus, on the other hand, he tells Oilier, " is my fa- 
vourite poem ; I charge you, therefore, specially to pet 
him and feed him with fine ink and good paper " — which 
was duly done. Again : — " For Prometheus, I expect 
and desire no great sale ; Prometheus was never intend- 
ed for more than five or six persons ; it is in my judg- 
ment of a higher character than anything I have yet at- 
tempted, and is perhaps less an imitation of anything 
that has gone before it ; it is original, and cost me se- 
vere mental labour." Shelley was right in judging that 
The Cenci would be comparatively popular; this was 
proved by the fact that it went through two editions in 
his lifetime. The value he set upon Prometheus as the 



y.] ITALY. 129 

higher work, will hardly be disputed. Unique in the 
history of literature, and displaying the specific qualities 
of its author at their height, the world could less easily 
afford to lose this drama than The Cenci, even though 
that be the greatest tragedy composed in English since 
the death of Shakespere. For reasons which will be ap- 
preciated by lovers of dramatic poetry, I refrain from de- 
taching portions of these two plays. Those who desire 
to make themselves acquainted with the author's genius, 
must devote long and patient study to the originals in 
their entirety. 

Prometheus Unbound, like the majority of Shelley's 
works, fell still-born from the press. It furnished punsters 
with a joke, however, which went the round of several pa- 
pers ; this poem, they cried, is well named, for who would 
bind it ? Of criticism that deserves the name, Shelley got 
absolutely nothing in his lifetime. The stupid but ven- 
omous reviews which gave him occasional pain, but which 
he mostly laughed at, need not now be mentioned. It is 
not much to any purpose to abuse the authors of mere 
rubbish. The real lesson to be learned from such of them 
as may possibly have been sincere, as well as from the 
failure of his contemporaries to appreciate his genius — the 
sneers of Moore, the stupidity of Campbell, the ignorance 
of Wordsworth, the priggishness of Southey, or the con- 
descending tone of Keats — is that nothing is more diffi- 
cult than for lesser men or equals to pay just homage to 
the greatest in their lifetime. Those who may be inter- 
ested in studying Shelley's attitude toward his critics, 
should read a letter addressed to Oilier from Florence, Oc- 
tober 15, 1819, soon after he had seen the vile attack 
upon him in the Quarterly, comparing this with the frag- 
ments of an expostulatory letter to the Editor, and the 



130 SHELLEY. . [chap. t. 

preface to Adonais. 1 It is clear that, though he bore 
scurrilous abuse with patience, he was prepared if need- 
ful to give blow for blow. On the 11th of June, 1821, he 
wrote to Oilier : — " As yet I have laughed ; but woe to 
those scoundrels if they should once make me lose my 
temper!" The stanzas on the Quarterly in Adonais, and 
the invective against Lord Eldon, show what Shelley. could 
have done if he had chosen to castigate the curs. Mean- 
while the critics achieved what they intended. Shelley, 
as Trelawny emphatically tells us, was universally shunned, 
coldly treated by Byron's friends at Pisa, and regarded as 
a monster by such of the English in Italy as had not made 
his personal acquaintance. On one occasion he is even 
said to have been knocked down in a post-office by some 
big bully, who escaped before he could obtain his name 
and address ; but this is one of the stories rendered doubt- 
ful by lack of precise details. 

1 Shelley Memorials, p. 121. Garnett's Relics of Shelley, pp. 49, 
190. Collected Letters, p. 147, in Moxon's Edition of Works in one 
vol. 1840. 



CHAPTER VI. 

RESIDENCE AT PISA. 

On the 26th of January, 1820, the Shelley s established 
themselves at Pisa. From this date forward to the 7th of 
July, 1822, Shelley's life divides itself into two periods of 
unequal length ; the first spent at Pisa, the baths of San 
Giuliano, and Leghorn ; the second at Lerici, on the Bay 
of Spezia. Without entering into minute particulars of 
dates or recording minor changes of residence, it is pos- 
sible to treat of the first and longer period in general. 
The house he inhabited at Pisa was on the south side of 
the Arno. After a few months he became the neighbour 
of Lord Byron, who engaged the Palazzo Lanfranchi in 
order to be near him ; and here many English and Italian 
friends gathered round them. Among these must be men- 
tioned in the first place Captain Medwin, whose recollec- 
tions of the Pisan residence are of considerable value, and 
next Captain Trelawny, who has left a record of Shelley's 
last days only equalled in vividness by Hogg's account of 
the Oxford period, and marked by signs of more unmis- 
takable accuracy. Not less important members of this 
private circle were Mr. and Mrs. Edward Elleker Williams, 
with whom Shelley and his wife lived on terms of the 
closest friendship. Among Italians, the physician Vacca, 



132 SHELLEY. [chap. 

the improvisatore Sgricci, and Rosini, the author of La 
Monaca di Monza, have to be recorded. It will be seen 
from this enumeration that Shelley was no longer solitary ; 
and indeed it would appear that now, upon the eve of his 
accidental death, he had begun to enjoy an immunity from 
many of his previous sufferings. Life expanded before 
him : his letters show that he was concentrating his pow- 
ers and preparing for a fresh flight ; and the months, 
though ever productive of poetic masterpieces, promised 
a still more magnificent birth in the future. 

In the summer and autumn of 1820, Shelley produced 
some of his most genial poems : the Letter to Maria Gis- 
borne, which might be mentioned as a pendent to Julian 
and Maddalo for its treatment of familiar things; the 
Ode to a Skylark, that most popular of all his lyrics ; the 
Witch of Atlas, unrivalled as an Ariel-flight of fairy fancy; 
and the Ode to Naples, which, together with the Ode to 
Liberty, added a new. lyric form to English literature. In 
the winter he wrote the Sensitive Plant, prompted there- 
to, we are told, by the flowers which crowded Mrs. Shel- 
ley's drawing-room, and exhaled their sweetness to the 
temperate Italian sunlight. "Whether we consider the num- 
ber of these poems or their diverse character, ranging from 
verse separated by an exquisitely subtle line from simple 
prose to the most impassioned eloquence and the most 
ethereal imagination, we shall be equally astonished. Ev- 
ery chord of the poet's lyre is touched, from the deep bass 
string that echoes the diurnal speech of such a man as 
Shelley was, to the fine vibrations of a treble merging its 
rarity of tone in accents super-sensible to ordinary ears. 
One passage from the Letter to Maria Gisborne may here 
be quoted, not for its poetry, but for the light it casts 
upon the circle of his English friends. 



vi.] RESIDENCE AT PISA. 133 

You are now 
In London, that great sea, whose ebb and flow 
At once is deaf and loud, and on the shore 
Vomits its wrecks, and still howls on for more. 
Yet in its depth what treasures ! You will see 
That which was Godwin, — greater none than he 
Though fallen — and fallen on evil times — to stand 
Among the spirits of our age and land, 
Before the dread tribunal of To come 
The foremost, while Rebuke cowers pale and dumb. 
You will see Coleridge — he who sits obscure 
In the exceeding lustre and the pure 
Intense irradiation of a mind, 
Which, with its own internal lightning blind, 
Flags wearily through darkness and despair — 
A cloud-encircled meteor of the air, 
A hooded eagle among blinking owls. 
You will see Hunt ; one of those happy souls 
Which are the salt of the earth, and without whom 
This world would smell like what it is — a tomb ; 
Who is, what others seem. His room no doubt 
Is still adorned by many a cast from Shout, 
With graceful flowers tastefully placed about, 
And coronals of bay from ribbons hung, 
And brighter wreaths in neat disorder flung ; 
The gifts of the most learn'd among some dozens 
Of female friends, sisters-in-law, and cousins. 
And there is he w r ith his eternal puns, 
Which beat the dullest brain for smiles, like duns 
Thundering for money at a poet's door ; 
Alas ! it is no use to say, " I'm poor !" — 
Or oft in graver mood, w r hen he will look 
Things wiser than were ever read in book, 
Except in Shakespere's wisest tenderness. 
You will see Hogg ; and I cannot express 
His virtues, though I know that they are great, 
Because he locks, then barricades the gate 
Within which they inhabit. Of his wit 
And wisdom, you'll cry out when you are bit. 



134 SHELLEY. [chap. 

He is a pearl within an oyster-shell, 

One of the richest of the deep. And there 

Is English Peacock, with his mountain fair, — 

Turn'd into a Flamingo, that shy bird 

That gleams in the Indian air. Have you not heard 

"When a man marries, dies, or turns Hindoo, 

His best friends hear no more of him. But you 

Will see him, and will like him too, I hope, 

With the milk-white Snowdonian antelope 

Match'd with this camelopard. His fine wit 

Makes such a wound, the knife is lost in it ; 

A strain too learned for a shallow age, 

Too wise for selfish bigots ; let his page 

Which charms the chosen spirits of the time, 

Fold itself up for the serener clime 

Of years to come, and find its recompense 

In that just expectation. Wit and sense, 

Virtue and human knowledge, all that might 

Make this dull world a business of delight, 

Are all combined in Horace Smith. And these, 

With some exceptions, which I need not tease 

Your patience by descanting on, are all 

You and I know in London. 

Captain Medwin, who came late in the autumn of 1820, 
at his cousin's invitation, to stay with the Shelleys, has re- 
corded many interesting details of their Pisan life, as well 
as valuable notes of Shelley's conversation. " It was near- 
ly seven years since we had parted, but I should have im- 
mediately recognized him in a crowd. His figure was 
emaciated, and somewhat bent, owing to near-sightedness, 
and his being forced to lean over his books, with his eyes 
almost touching them ; his hair, still profuse, and curling 
naturally, was partially interspersed with grey ; but his 
appearance was youthful. There was also a freshness and 
purity in his complexion that he never lost." Not long 
after his arrival, Medwin suffered from a severe and tedi- 



vi.j RESIDENCE AT PISA. 135 

ous illness. " Shelley tended me like a brother. He ap- 
plied my leeches, administered my medicines, and during 
six weeks that I was confined to my room, was assiduous 
and unintermitting in his affectionate care of me." The 
poet's solitude and melancholy at this time impressed his 
cousin very painfully. Though he was producing a long 
series of imperishable poems, he did not take much inter- 
est in his work. " I am disgusted with writing," he once 
said, " and were it not for an irresistible impulse, that pre- 
dominates my better reason, should discontinue so doing." 
The brutal treatment he had lately received from the 
Quarterly Review, the calumnies which pursued him, and 
the coldness of all but a very few friends, checked his 
enthusiasm for composition. Of this there is abundant 
proof in his correspondence. In a letter to Leigh Hunt, 
dated Jan. 25, 1822, he says : " My faculties are shaken to 
atoms and torpid. I can write nothing ; and if Adonais 
had no success, and excited no interest, what incentive can 
I have to write?" Again : "I write little now. It is im- 
possible to compose except under the strong excitement 
of an assurance of finding sympathy in what you write." 
Lord Byron's company proved now, as before, a check 
rather than an incentive to production: "I do not write; 
I have lived too long near Lord Byron, and the sun has 
extinguished the glow-worm ; for I cannot hope, with St. 
John, that the light came into the world and the world 
knew it not.'''' " I despair of rivalling Lord Byron, as well 
I may, and there is no other with whom it is worth con- 
tending." To Oilier, in 1820, he wrote : " I doubt wheth- 
er I shall write more. I could be content either with the 
hell or the paradise of poetry; but the torments of its 
purgatory vex me, without exciting my powers sufficiently 
to put an end to the vexation." It was not that his spirit 



136 SHELLEY. [chap. 

was cowed by the Reviews, or that he mistook the sort of 
audience he had to address. He more than once acknowl- 
edged that, while Byron wrote for the many, his poems 
were intended for the understanding few. Yet the <rv- 
veto\ as he called them, gave him but scanty encourage- 
ment. The cold phrases of kindly Horace Smith show 
that he had not comprehended Prometheus Unbound; 
and Shelley whimsically complains that even intelligent 
and sympathetic critics confounded the ideal passion de- 
scribed in JEpii^sychidion with the love affairs of "a ser- 
vant-girl and her sweetheart." This almost incomprehen- 
sible obtuseness on the part of men who ought to have 
known better, combined with the coarse abuse of vulgar 
scribblers, was enough to make a man so sincerely modest 
as Shelley doubt his powers, or shrink from the severe la- 
bour of developing them. 1 " The decision of the cause," 
he wrote to Mr. Gisborne, " whether or no / am a poet, is 
removed from the present time to the hour when our pos- 
terity shall assemble ; but the court is a very severe one, 
and I fear that the verdict will be, guilty — death." Deep 
down in his own heart he had, however, less doubt : " This 
I know," he said to Medwin, " that whether in prosing or 
in versing, there is something in my writings that shall 
live for ever." And again he writes to Hunt : " I am full 
of thoughts and plans, and should do something, if the 
feeble and irritable frame which encloses it was willing 
to obey the spirit. I fancy that then I should do great 
things." It seems almost certain that the incompleteness 
of many longer works designed in the Italian period, the 
abandonment of the tragedy on Tasso's story, the unfin- 
ished state of Charles I., and the failure to execute the 

1 See Medwin, vol. ii. p. 172, for Shelley's comment on the difficul- 
ty of the poet's art. 



vi.] RESIDENCE AT PISA. 137 

cherished plan of a drama suggested by the Book of Job, 
were due to the depressing effects of ill-health and exter- 
nal discouragement. Poetry with Shelley was no light 
matter. He composed under the pressure of intense ex- 
citement, and he elaborated his first draughts with minute 
care and severe self-criticism. 

These words must not be taken as implying that he 
followed the Yirgilian precedent of polishing and reducing 
the volume of his verses by an anxious exercise of calm 
reflection, or that he observed the Horatian maxim of 
deferring their publication till the ninth year. The con- 
trary was notoriously the case with him. Yet it is none 
the less proved by the state of his manuscripts that his 
compositions, even as we now possess them, were no mere 
improvisations. The passage already quoted from his 
Defence of Poetry shows the high ideal he had conceived 
of the poet's duty toward his art ; and it may be confi- 
dently asserted that his whole literary career was one long- 
struggle to emerge from the incoherence of his earlier ef- 
forts, into the clearness of expression and precision of 
form that are the index of mastery over style. At the 
same time it was inconsistent with his most firmly rooted 
aesthetic principles to attempt composition except under 
an impulse approaching to inspiration. To imperil his 
life by the fiery taxing of all his faculties, moral, intel- 
lectual, and physical, and to undergo the discipline ex- 
acted by his own fastidious taste, with no other object in 
view than the frigid compliments of a few friends, was 
more than even Shelley's enthusiasm could endure. He, 
therefore, at this period required the powerful stimulus of 
some highly exciting cause from without to determine his 
activity. 

Such external stimulus came to Shelley from three 
1 



133 SHELLEY. 



|_CHAP. 



quarters early in the year 1821. Among his Italian ac- 
quaintances at Pisa was a clever but disreputable Pro- 
fessor, of whom Medwin draws a very piquant portrait. 
This man one day related the sad story of a beautiful and 
noble lady, the Contessina Emilia Viviani, who had been 
confined by her father, in a dismal convent of the suburbs, 
to await her marriage with a distasteful husband. Shelley, 
fired as ever by a tale of tyranny, was eager to visit the 
fair captive. The Professor accompanied him and Med- 
win to the convent -parlour, where they found her more ! 
lovely than even the most glowing descriptions had led 
them to expect. Nor was she only beautiful. Shelley 
soon discovered that she had " cultivated her mind beyond 
what I have ever met with in Italian women ;" and a rhap- 
sody composed by her upon the subject of Uranian Love 
— II Vero Am ore — justifies the belief that she possessed 
an intellect of more than- ordinary elevation. He took 
Mrs. Shelley to see her, and both did all they could to 
make her convent-prison less irksome, by frequent visits, 
by letters, and by presents of flowers and books. It was 
not long before Shelley's sympathy for this unfortunate 
lady took the form of love, which, however spiritual and 
Platonic, was not the less passionate. .The result was the 
composition of Epipsychidion, the most unintelligible of 
all his poems to those who have not assimilated the spirit 
of Plato's Symposium and Dante's Vita JVuova. In it he 
apostrophizes Emilia Viviani as the incarnation of ideal 
beauty, the universal loveliness made visible in mortal 
flesh:— 

Seraph of Heaven ! too gentle to be human, 
Veiling beneath that radiant form of woman 
All that is insupportable in thee 
<•:'.. Of light, and love, and immortality ! 



VI.] 



RESIDENCE AT PISA. 139 



He tells her that he loves her, and describes the troubles 
and deceptions of his earlier manhood, under allegories 
veiled in deliberate obscurity. The Pandemic and the 
Uranian Aphrodite have striven for his soul ; for though 
in youth he dedicated himself to the service of ideal beau- 
ty, and seemed to find it under many earthly shapes, yet 
has he ever been deluded. At last Emily appears, and in 
her he recognizes the truth of the vision veiled from him 
.so many years. She and Mary shall henceforth, like sun 
and moon, rule the world of love within him. Then he 
calls on her to fly. They three will escape and live to- 
gether, far away from men, in an JEgean island. The 
description of this visionary isle, and of the life to be led 
there by the fugitives from a dull and undiscerning world, 
is the most beautiful that has been written this century in 
the rhymed heroic metre. 

It is an isle under Ionian skies, 

Beautiful as a wreck of Paradise ; 

And, for the harbours are not safe and good, 

This land would have remained a solitude 

But for some pastoral people native there, 

Who from the Elysian, clear, and golden air 

Draw the last spirit of the age of gold, 

Simple and spirited, innocent and bold. 

The blue iEgean girds this chosen home, 

With ever-changing sound and light and foam 

Kissing the sifted sands and caverns hoar ; 

And all the winds wandering along the shore, 

Undulate with the undulating tide. 

There are thick woods where sylvan forms abide ; 

And many a fountain, rivulet, and pond, 

As clear as elemental diamond, 

Or serene morning air. And far beyond, 

The mossy tracks made by the goats and deer, 

(Which the rough shepherd treads but once a year,) 



140 SHELLEY. [chap. 

Pierce into glades, caverns, and bowers, and halls 
Built round with ivy, which the waterfalls 
Illumining, with sound that never fails 
Accompany the noonday nightingales ; 
And all the place is peopled with sweet airs. 
The light clear element which the isle wears 
Is heavy with the scent of lemon-flowers, 
Which floats like mist laden with unseen showers, 
And falls upon the eyelids like faint sleep ; 
And from the moss violets and jonquils peep, 
And dart their arrowy odour through the brain, 
Till you might faint with that delicious pain. 
And every motion, odour, beam, and tone, 
With that deep music is in unison : 
Which is a soul within a soul — they seem 
Like echoes of an antenatal dream. 
It is an isle 'twixt heaven, air, earth, and sea, 
Cradled, and hung in clear tranquillity ; 
Bright as that wandering Eden, Lucifer, 
Washed by the soft blue oceans of young air. 
It is a favoured place. Famine or Blight, 
Pestilence, War, and Earthquake, never light 
Upon its mountain-peaks ; blind vultures, they 
Sail onward far upon their fatal way. 
The winged storms, chanting their thunder-psalm 
To other lands, leave azure chasms of calm 
Over this isle, or weep themselves in dew, 
Prom which its fields and woods ever renew 
Their green and golden immortality. 
And from the sea there rise, and from the sky 
There fall, clear exhalations, soft and bright, 
Veil after veil, each hiding some delight, 
Which sun or moon or zephyr draws aside, 
Till the isle's beauty, like a naked bride 
Glowing at once with love and loveliness, 
Blushes and trembles at its own excess : 
Yet, like a buried lamp, a soul no less 
Burns in the heart of this delicious isle, 
An atom of the Eternal, whose own smile 



vi.] RESIDENCE AT PISA. 141 

Unfolds itself, and may be felt not seen 

O'er the grey rocks, blue waves, and forests green, 

Filling their bare and void interstices. 

Shelley did not publish Epipsychidion with his own 
name. He gave it to the world as the composition of a 
man who had "died at Florence, as he was preparing for 
a voyage to one of the Sporades," and he requested Oilier 
not to circulate it, except among a few intelligent readers. 
It may almost be said to have been never published, in 
such profound silence did it issue from the press. Very 
shortly after its appearance he described it to Leigh Hunt 
as " a portion of me already dead," and added this signifi- 
cant allusion to its subject matter : — " Some of us have in 
a prior existence been in love with an Antigone, and that 
makes us find no full content in any mortal tie." In the 
letter of June 18, 1822, again he says: — "The Epipsy- 
chidion I cannot look at ; the person whom it celebrates 
was a cloud instead of a Juno ; and poor Ixion starts from 
the Centaur that was the offspring of his own embrace. 
If you are curious, however, to hear what I am and have 
been, it will tell you something thereof. It is an idealized 
history of my life and feelings. I think one is always in 
love with something or other ; the error, and I confess it 
is not easy for spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it, 
consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what 
is, perhaps, eternal." This paragraph contains the essence 
of a just criticism. Brilliant as the poem is, we cannot 
read it with unwavering belief either in the author's sin- 
cerity at the time he wrote it, or in the permanence of the 
emotion it describes. The exordium has a fatal note of 
rhetorical exaggeration, not because the kind of passion 
is impossible, but because Shelley does not convince us 
that in this instance he had really been its subject. His 



142 SHELLEY. [chap. 

own critique, following so close upon the publication of 
Epipsychidion, confirms the impression made by it, and 
justifies the conclusion that he had utilized his feeling for 
Emilia to express a favourite doctrine in impassioned 
verse. 

To students of Shelley's inner life Epipsychidion will 
always have high value, independently of its beauty of 
style, as containing his doctrine of love. It is the full 
expression of the esoteric principle presented to us in 
Alastor, the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, and Prince 
Atkanase. But the words just quoted, which may be 
compared with Mrs. Shelley's note to Prince Atkanase, au- 
thorize our pointing out what he himself recognized as 
the defect of his theory. Instead of remaining true to 
the conception of Beauty expressed in the Hymn, Shelley 
" sought through the world the One whom he may love." 
Thus, while his doctrine in Epipsychidion seems Platonic, 
it will not square with the Symposium. Plato treats the 
love of a beautiful person as a mere initiation into di- 
vine mysteries, the first step in the ladder that ascends 
to heaven. When a man has formed a just conception 
of the universal beauty, he looks back with a smile upon 
those who find their soul's sphere in the love of some 
mere mortal object. Tested by this standard, Shelley's 
identification of Intellectual Beauty with so many daugh- 
ters of earth, and his worshipping love of Emilia, is a 
spurious Platonism. Plato w T ould have said that to seek 
the Idea of Beauty in Emilia Viviani was a retrogressive 
step. All that she could do, would be to quicken the 
soul's sense of beauty, to stir it from its lethargy, and to 
make it divine the eternal reality of beauty in the super- 
sensual world of thought. This Shelley had already ac- 
knowledged in the Hymn; and this he emphasizes in 



vi.] » RESIDENCE AT PISA. 143 

these words : — " The error consists in seeking in a mortal 
image the likeness of what is, perhaps, eternal." 

The fragments and cancelled passages published in For- 
man's edition do not throw much light upon Epipsy- 
chidion. The longest, entitled To his Genius by its first 
editor, Mr. Garnett, reads like the induction to a poem 
conceived and written in a different key, and at a lower 
level of inspiration. It has, however, this extraordinary 
interest, that it deals with a love which is both love and 
friendship, above sex, spiritual, unintelligible to the world 
at large. Thus the fragment enables the student better 
to realize the kind of worship so passionately expressed in 
Epipsychidion. 

The news of Keats' s death at Rome on the 27th of De- 
cember, 1820, and the erroneous belief that it had been 
accelerated, if not caused, by a contemptible review of En- 
dymion in the Quarterly, stirred Shelley to the composi- 
tion of Adonais. He had it printed at Pisa, and sent cop- 
ies to Oilier for circulation in London. This poem was 
a favourite with its author, who hoped not only that it 
might find acceptance with the public, but also that it 
would confer lustre upon the memory of a poet whom he 
sincerely admired. No criticisms upon Shelley's works 
are half so good as his own. It is, therefore, interesting 
to collect the passages in which he speaks of an elegy 
only equalled in our language by Lycidas, and in the point 
of passionate eloquence even superior to Milton's youth- 
ful lament for his friend. " The Adonais, in spite of its 
mysticism," he writes to Oilier, "is the least imperfect of 
my compositions." "I confess I should be surprised if 
that poem were born to an immortality of oblivion." " It 
is a highly wrought piece of art, and perhaps better, in 
point of composition, than anything I have written." " It 



144 SHELLEY. [chap. 

is absurd in any review to criticize Adonais, and still more 
to pretend that the verses are bad." " I know what to 
think of Adonais, but what to think of those who con- 
found it with the many bad poems of the day, I know 
not." Again, alluding to the stanzas hurled against the 
infamous Quarterly reviewer, he says : — " I have dipped 
my pen in consuming fire for his destroyers ; otherwise 
the style is calm and solemn." 

With these estimates the reader of to-day will cordially 
agree. Although Adonais is not so utterly beyond the 
scope of other poets as Prometheus or Epipsychidion, it 
presents Shelley's qualities in a form of even and sustain- 
ed beauty, brought within the- sphere of the dullest appre- 
hensions. Shelley, we may notice, dwells upon the art of 
the poem ; and this, perhaps, is what at first sight will 
strike the student most. He chose as a foundation for 
his work those laments of Bion for Adonis, and of Mos- 
chus for Bion, which are^the most pathetic products of 
Greek idyllic poetry ;! and the transmutation of their ma- 
terial into the substance of highly spiritualized modern 
thought, reveals the potency of a Prospero's wand. It is 
a metamorphosis whereby the art of excellent but positive 
poets has been translated into the sphere of metaphysical 
imagination. Urania takes the place of Aphrodite; the 
thoughts and fancies and desires of the dead singer are 
substituted for Bion's cupids; and instead of mountain 
shepherds, the living bards of England are summoned to 
lament around the poet's bier. Yet it is only when Shel- 
ley frees himself from the influence of his models, that he 
soars aloft on mighty wing. This point, too, is the point 
of transition from death, sorrow, and the past to immor- 
tality, joy, and the rapture of the things that cannot pass 
away. The first and second portions of the poem are, at 



vi.] KESIDENCE AT PISA. 145 

the same time, thoroughly concordant, and the passage 
from the one to the other is natural. Two quotations 
from Adonais will suffice to show the power and sweetness 
of its verse. 

The first is a description of Shelley himself following 
Byron and Moore — the " Pilgrim of Eternity," and Ierne's 
"sweetest lyrist of her saddest wrong" — to the couch 
where Keats lies dead. There is both pathos and uncon- 
scious irony in his making these two poets the chief 
mourners, when we remember what Byron wrote about 
Keats in Don Juan, and what Moore afterwards recorded 
of Shelley ; and when we think, moreover, how far both 
Keats and Shelley have outsoared Moore, and disputed 
with Byron his supreme place in the heaven of poetry. 

Midst others of less note, came one frail Form, 
A phantom among men, companionless 
As the last cloud of an expiring storm, 
Whose thunder is its knell. He, as I guess, 
Had gazed on Nature's naked loveliness, 
Actaeon-like, and now he fled astray 
"With feeble steps o'er the world's wilderness, 
And his own thoughts, along that rugged way, 
Pursued like raging hounds their father and their prey. 

A pard-like Spirit beautiful and swift — 
A love in desolation masked — a Power 
Girt round with weakness ; it can scarce uplift 
The weight of the superincumbent hour ; 
Is it a dying lamp, a falling shower, 
A breaking billow ; — even whilst we speak 
Is it not broken ? On the withering flower 
The killing sun smiles brightly : on a cheek 
The life can burn in blood, even while the heart may break. 

His head was bound with pansies over-blown, 
And faded violets, white and pied and blue,* 



146 SHELLEY. [chap. 

And a light spear topped with a cypress cone, 
Bound whose rude shaft dark ivy-tresses grew 
Yet dripping with the forest's noon-day dew, 
Vibrated, as the ever-beating heart 
Shook the weak hand that grasped it. Of that crew 
He came the last, neglected and apart ; 
A herd-abandoned deer, struck by the hunter's dart. 

The second passage is the peroration of the poem. 
Nowhere has Shelley expressed his philosophy of man's 
relation to the universe with more sublimity and with a 
more imperial command of language than in these stanzas. 
If it were possible to identify that philosophy with any 
recognized system of thought, it might be called panthe- 
ism. But it is difficult to affix a name, stereotyped by the 
usage of the schools, to the aerial spiritualism of its ar- 
dent and impassioned poet's creed. 

The movement of the long melodious sorrow-song has 
just been interrupted by three stanzas, in which Shelley 
lashes the reviewer of Keats. He now bursts forth afresh 
into the music of consolation : — 

Peace, peace ! he is not dead, he doth not sleep ! 
He hath awakened from the dream of life. 
'Tis we who, lost in stormy visions, keep 
With phantoms an unprofitable strife, 
And in mad trance strike with our spirit's knife 
Invulnerable nothings. We decay 
Like corpses in a charnel ; fear and grief 
Convulse us and consume us day by day, 
And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay. 

He has outsoared the shadow of our night ; 
Envy and calumny, and hate and pain, 
And that unrest which men miscall delight, 
Can touch him not and torture not again ; 
From the contagion of the world's slow stain 



ti.] RESIDENCE AT PISA. 147 

He is secure, and now can never mourn 
A heart grown cold, a head grown grey in vain ; 
Nor, when the spirit's self has ceased to burn, 
With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn. 

He lives, he wakes — 'tis Death is dead, not he ; 
Mourn not for Adonais. — Thou young Dawn, 
Turn all thy dew to splendour, for from thee 
The spirit thou lamentest is not gone ; 
Ye caverns and ye forests, cease to moan ! 
Cease, ye faint flowers and fountains, and thou Air 
Which like a mourning veil thy scarf hadst thrown 
O'er the abandoned Earth, now leave it bare 
Even to the joyous stars which smile on its despair ! 

He is made one with Nature : there is heard 
His voice in all her music, from the moan 
Of thunder, to the song of night's sweet bird ; 
He is a presence to be felt and known 
In darkness and in light, from herb and stone, 
Spreading itself where'er that Power may move 
Which has withdrawn his being to its own ; 
Which wields the world with never wearied love, 
Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above. 

He is a portion of the loveliness 
Which once he made more lovely : he doth bear 
His part, while the One Spirit's plastic stress 
Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there 
All new successions to the forms they wear ; 
Torturing th' unwilling dross that checks its flight 
To its own likeness, as each mass may bear ; 
And bursting in its beauty and its might 
From trees and beasts and men into the Heaven's light. 



But the absorption of the human soul into primeval 
nature - forces, the blending of the principle of thought 
with the universal spirit of beauty, is not enough to sat- 



148 SHELLEY. [chap. 

isfy man's yearning after immortality. Therefore in the 
next three stanzas the indestructibility of the personal self 
is presented to us, as the soul of Adonais passes into the 
company of the illustrious dead who, like him, were un- 
timely slain : — 

The splendours of the firmament of time 
May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not : 
Like stars to their appointed height they climb, 
And death is a low mist which cannot blot 
The brightness it may veil. When lofty thought 
Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair, 
And love and life contend in it, for what 
Shall be its earthly doom^the dead live there, 
And move like winds of light on dark and stormy air. 

The inheritors of unfulfilled renown 
Kose from their thrones, built beyond mortal thought, 
Far in the Unapparent. Chatterton 
Eose pale, his solemn agony had not 
Yet faded from him ; Sidney, as he fought 
And as he fell, and as he lived and loved, 
Sublimely mild, a Spirit without spot, 
Arose ; and Lucan, by his death approved : — 
Oblivion as they rose shrank like a thing reproved. 

And many more, whose names on Earth are dark, 
But whose transmitted effluence cannot die 
So long as fire outlives the parent spark, 
Eose, robed in dazzling immortality. 
" Thou art become as one of us," they cry ; 
" It was for thee yon kingless sphere has long 
Swung blind in unascended majesty, 
Silent alone amid an Heaven of song. 
Assume thy winged throne, thou Yesper of our throng !" 

From the more universal and philosophical aspects of 
his theme, the poet once more turns to the special subject 



vi.] RESIDENCE AT PISA. 149 

that had stirred him. Adonais lies dead ; and those who 
mourn him must seek his grave. He has escaped : to fol- 
low him is to die ; and where should we learn to dote on 
death unterrified, if not in Rome? In this way the de- 
scription of Keats's resting-place beneath the pyramid of 
Cestius, which was also destined to be Shelley's own, is 
introduced : — 



Who mourns for Adonais ? oh come forth, 
Fond wretch ! and show thyself and him aright. 
Clasp with thy panting soul the pendulous Earth ; 
As from a centre, dart thy spirit's light 
Beyond all worlds, until its spacious might 
Satiate the void circumference : then shrink 
Even to a point within our day and night ; 
And keep thy heart light, let it make thee sink 
When hope has kindled hope, and lured thee to the brink. 

Or go to Rome, which is the sepulchre, 
Oh, not of him, but of our joy : 'tis nought 
That ages, empires, and religions there 
Lie buried in the ravage they have wrought ; 
For such as he can lend, — they borrow not 
Glory from those who made the world their prey ; 
And he is gathered to the kings of thought 
Who waged contention with their time's decay, 
And of the past are all that cannot pass away. 

Go thou to Rome, — at once the Paradise, 
The grave, the city, and the wilderness ; 
And where its wrecks like shattered mountains rise, 
And flowering weeds and fragrant copses dress 
The bones of Desolation's nakedness, 
Pass, till the Spirit of the spot shall lead 
Thy footsteps to a slope of green access, 
Where, like an infant's smile, over the dead 
A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread ; 



150 SHELLEY. [chap. 

And grey walls moulder round, on which dull Time 
Feeds, like slow fire upon a hoary brand ; 
And one keen pyramid with wedge sublime, 
Pavilioning the dust of him who planned 
This refuge for his memory, doth stand 
Like flame transformed to marble ; and beneath, 
A field is spread, on which a newer band 
Have pitched in Heaven's smile their camp of death, 
Welcoming him we lose with scarce extinguished breath. 

Here pause : these graves are all too young as yet 
To have outgrown the sorrow which consigned 
Its charge to each ; and if the seal is set, 
Here, on one fountain of a mourning mind, 
Break if not thou ! too surely shalt thou find 
Thine own well full, if thou returnest home, 
Of tears and gall. From the world's bitter wind 
Seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb. 
What Adonais is, why fear we to become ? 



Yet again the thought of Death as the deliverer, the re- 
vealer, and the mystagogue, through whom the soul of man 
is reunited to the spirit of the universe, returns ; and on 
this solemn note the poem closes. The symphony of ex- 
ultation which had greeted the passage of Adonais into 
the eternal world, is here subdued to a graver key, as befits 
the mood of one whom mystery and mourning still op- 
press on earth. Yet even in the somewhat less than jubi- 
lant conclusion we feel that highest of all Shelley's quali- 
ties — the liberation of incalculable energies, the emancipa- 
tion and expansion of a force within the soul, victorious 
over circumstance, exhilarated and elevated by contact with 
such hopes as make a feebler spirit tremble : 

The One remains, the many change and pass ; 
Heaven's light for ever shines, Earth's shadows fly ; 



VI.] RESIDENCE AT PISA. 151 

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, 
Stains the white radiance of Eternity, 
Until Death tramples it to fragments. — Die, 
If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek ! 
Follow where all is fled ! — Rome's azure sky, 
Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak 
The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak. 

Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my Heart ? 
Thy hopes are gone before : from all things here 
They have departed ; thou shouldst now depart ! 
A light is past from the revolving year, 
And man and woman ; and what still is dear 
Attracts to crush, repels to make thee wither. 
The soft sky smiles, the low wind whispers near : 
'Tis Adonais calls ! oh, hasten thither ! 
No more let Life divide what Death can join together. 

That light whose smile kindles the Universe, 
That beauty in which all things work and move, 
That benediction which the eclipsing curse 
Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love 
Which through the web of being blindly wove 
By man and beast and earth and air and sea, 
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of 
The fire for which all thirst, now beams on me, 
Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality. 

The breath whose might I have invoked in song 
Descends on me ; my spirit's bark is driven 
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng 
Whose sails were never to the tempest given. 
The massy earth and sphered skies are riven ! 
I am borne darkly, fearfully afar ; 
Whilst burning through the inmost veil of Heaven, 
The soul of Adonais, like a star, 
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are. 

It will be seen that, whatever Shelley may from time to 



152 SHELLEY. [chap. 

time have said about the immortality of the soul, he was 
no materialist, and no believer in the extinction of the 
spiritual element by death. Yet he was too wise to dog- 
matize upon a problem which by its very nature admits of 
no solution in this world. " I hope," he said, " but my 
hopes are not unmixed with fear for what will befall this 
inestimable spirit when we appear to die." On another 
occasion he told Trelawny, " I am content to see no far- 
ther into futurity than Plato and Bacon. My mind is 
tranquil; I have no fears and some hopes. In our pres- 
ent gross material state our faculties are clouded ; when 
Death removes our clay coverings, the mystery will be 
solved." How constantly the thought of death as the re- 
veal er was present to his mind, may be gathered from an 
incident related by Trelawny. They were bathing in the 
Arno, when Shelley, who could not swim, plunged into 
deep water, and "lay stretched out at the bottom like a 
conger eel, not making the least effort or struggle to save 
himself." Trelawny fished him out, and when he had 
taken breath, he said: "I always find the bottom of the 
well, and they say Truth lies there. In another minute I 
should have found it, and you would have found an empty 
shell. Death is the veil which those who live call life; 
they sleep, and it is lifted." Yet being pressed by his 
friend, he refused to acknowledge a formal and precise 
belief in the imperishability of the human soul. "We 
know nothing ; we have no evidence ; we cannot express 
our inmost thoughts. They are incomprehensible even to 
ourselves." The clear insight into the conditions of the 
question conveyed by the last sentence is very character- 
istic of Shelley. It makes us regret the non-completion 
of his essay on a Future Life, which would certainly have 
stated the problem with rare lucidity and candour, and 



vi.] RESIDENCE AT PISA. 153 

would have illuminated the abyss of doubt with a sense 
of spiritual realities not often found in combination with 
wise suspension of judgment. What he clung to amid all 
perplexities was the absolute and indestructible existence 
of the universal as perceived by us in love, beauty, and de- 
light. Though the destiny of the personal self be obscure, 
these things cannot fail. The conclusion of the Sensitive 
Plant might be cited as conveying the quintessence of his 
hope upon this most intangible of riddles. 

Whether the Sensitive Plant, or that 
Which within its boughs like a spirit sat, 
Ere its outward form had known decay, 
Now felt this change, I cannot say. 

I dare not guess ; but in this life 
Of error, ignorance, and strife, 
Where nothing is, but all things seem, 
And we the shadows of the dream : 

It is a modest creed, and yet 
Pleasant, if one considers it, 
To own that death itself must be, 
Like all the rest, a mockery. 

That garden sweet, that lady fair, 
And all sweet shapes and odours there, 
In truth have never passed away : 
'Tis we, 'tis ours, are changed ; not they. 

For love, and beauty, and delight, 
There is no death nor change ; their might 
Exceeds our organs, which endure 
No light, being themselves obscure. 

But it is now time to return from this digression to the 
poem which suggested it, and which, more than any other, 



154 SHELLEY. [chap. 

serves to illustrate its author's mood of feeling about the 
life beyond the grave. The last lines of Adonais might 
be read as a prophecy of his own death by drowning. 
The frequent recurrence of this thought in his poetry is, 
to say the least, singular. In Alastor we read : — 

A restless impulse urged him to embark 
And meet lone Death on the drear ocean's waste ; 
For well he knew that mighty Shadow loves 
The slimy caverns of the populous deep. 

The Ode to Liberty closes on the same note : — 

As a far taper fades with fading night ; 

As a brief insect dies with dying day, 
My song, its pinions disarrayed of might, 

Drooped. O'er it closed the echoes far away 
Of the great voice which did its flight sustain, 
As waves which lately paved his watery way 
Hiss round a drowner's head in their tempestuous play. 

The Stanzas written in Dejection, near Naples, echo the 
thought with a slight variation : — 

Yet now despair itself is mild, 

Even as the winds and waters are ; 
I could lie down like a tired child, 

And weep away the life of care 
Which I have borne, and yet must bear, — 

Till death like sleep might steal on me, 
And I might feel in the warm air 

My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea 
Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony. 

Trelawny tells a story of his friend's life at Lerici, which 
further illustrates his preoccupation with the thought of 
death at sea. He took Mrs. Williams and her children out 
upon the bay in his little boat one afternoon, and starting 
suddenly from a deep reverie, into which he had fallen, 






7i.] RESIDENCE AT PISA. 155 

exclaimed -with a joyful and resolute voice, " Now let us 
together solve the great mystery !" Too much value must 
not be attached to what might have been a mere caprice 
of utterance. Yet the proposal not unreasonably fright- 
ened Mrs. Williams, for Shelley's friends were accustomed 
to expect the realization of his wildest fancies. It may 
incidentally be mentioned that before the water finally 
claimed its victim, he had often been in peril of life upon 
his fatal element — during the first voyage to Ireland, while 
crossing the Channel with Mary in an open boat, again at 
Meillerie with Byron, and once at least with Williams. 

A third composition of the year 1821 was inspired by 
the visit of Prince Mavrocordato to Pisa. He called on 
Shelley in April, showed him a copy of Prince Ipsilanti's 
proclamation, and announced that Greece was determined 
to strike a blow for freedom. The news aroused all Shel- 
ley's enthusiasm, and he began the lyrical drama of Hellas, 
which he has described as " a sort of imitation of the Per- 
sae of JSschylus." We find him at work upon it in Oc- 
tober ; and it must have been finished by the end of that 
month, since the dedication bears the date of November 
1st, 1821. Shelley did not set great store by it. "It 
was written," he says, " without much care, and in one of 
those few moments of enthusiasm which now seldom visit 
me, and which make me pay dear for their visits." The 
preface might, if space permitted, be cited as a specimen 
of his sound and weighty judgment upon one of the great- 
est political questions of this century. What he says about 
the debt of the modern world to ancient Hellas, is no less 
pregnant than his severe strictures upon the part played 
by Russia in dealing with Eastern questions. For the rest, 
the poem is distinguished by passages of great lyrical 
beauty, rising at times to the sublimest raptures, and 



156 SHELLEY. [chap. 

closing on the half -pathetic cadence of that well-known 
Chorus, " The world's great age begins anew." Of dra- 
matic interest it has but little ; nor is the play, as finished, 
equal to the promise held forth by the superb fragment of 
its so-called Prologue. 1 This truly magnificent torso must, 
I think, have been the commencement of the drama as 
conceived upon a different and more colossal plan, which 
Shelley rejected for some unknown reason. It shows the 
influence not only of the Book of Job, but also of the 
Prologue in Heaven to Faust, upon his mind. 

The lyric movement of the Chorus from Hellas, which 
I propose to quote, marks the highest point of Shelley's 
rhythmical invention. As for the matter expressed in it, 
we must not forget that these stanzas are written for a Cho- 
rus of Greek captive women, whose creed does not prevent 
their feeling a regret for the " mightier forms of an old- 
er, austerer worship." Shelley's note reminds the reader, 
with characteristic caution and frankness, that " the popu- 
lar notions of Christianity are represented in this Chorus 
as true in their relation to the worship they superseded, 
and that which in all probability they will supersede, with- 
out considering their merits in a relation more universal." 

Worlds on worlds are rolling ever 

From creation to decay, 
Like the bubbles on a river 

Sparkling, bursting, borne away. 

But they are still immortal 

Who, through birth's orient portal, 
And death's dark chasm hurrying to and fro, 

Clothe their unceasing flight 

In the brief dust and light 
Gathered around their chariots as they go ; 

1 Forman, iv. p. 95. 



vi.] RESIDENCE AT PISA. 157 

New shapes they still may weave, 
New gods, new laws receive ; 
Bright or dim are they, as the robes they last 
On Death's bare ribs had cast. 

A power from the unknown God, 

A Promethean conqueror came ; 
Like a triumphal path he trod 
The thorns of death and shame. 
A mortal shape to him 
Was like the vapor dim 
Which the orient planet animates with light. 
Hell, Sin, and Slavery came, 
Like bloodhounds mild and tame, 
Nor preyed until their Lord had taken flight. 
The moon of Mahomet 
Arose, and it shall set : 
While blazoned as on heaven's immortal noon 
The cross leads generations on. 

Swift as the radiant shapes of sleep 

From one whose dreams are paradise, 
Fly, when the fond wretch wakes to weep, 
And day peers forth with her blank eyes ; 
So fleet, so faint, so fair, 
The Powers of earth and air 
Fled from the folding star of Bethlehem : 
Apollo, Pan, and Love, 
And even Olympian Jove, 
Grew weak, for killing Truth had glared on them. 
Our hills, and seas, and streams, 
Dispeopled of their dreams, 
Their waters turned to blood, their dew to tears, 
Wailed for the golden years. 



In the autumn of this year Shelley paid Lord Byron a 
visit at Ravenna, where he made acquaintance with the 
Countess Guiccoli. It was then settled that Byron, who 



158 SHELLEY. [chap. 

had formed the project of starting a journal to be called 
The Liberal in concert with Leigh Hunt, should himself 
settle in Pisa. Leigh Hunt was to join his brother poets 
in the same place. The prospect gave Shelley great pleas- 
ure, for he was sincerely attached to Hunt ; and though 
he would not promise contributions to the journal, partly 
lest his name should bring discredit on it, and partly be- 
cause he did not choose to appear before the world as a 
hanger-on of Byron's, he thoroughly approved of a plan 
which would be profitable to his friend by bringing him 
into close relation with the most famous poet of the age. 1 
That he was not without doubts as to Byron's working 
easily in harness with Leigh Hunt, may be seen in his cor- 
respondence ; and how fully these doubts were destined to 
be confirmed, is only too well known. 

At Ravenna he was tormented by the report of some 
more than usually infamous calumny. What it was, we 
do not know ; but that it made profound impression on 
his mind, appears from a remarkable letter addressed to 
his wife on the 16th and 17th of August from Ravenna. 
In it he repeats his growing weariness, and his wish to es- 
cape from society to solitude ; the weariness of a nature 
wounded and disappointed by commerce with the world,' 
but neither soured nor driven to fury by cruel wrongs. 
It is noticeable at the same time that he clings to his 
present place of residence : — " our roots never struck so 
deeply as at Pisa, and the transplanted tree flourishes not." 
At Pisa he had found real rest and refreshment in the so- 
ciety of his two friends, the Williamses. Some of his sad- 
dest and most touching lyrics of this year are addressed 
to Jane — for so Mrs. Williams was called ; and attentive 
students may perceive that the thought of Emilia was al- 
1 See the Letter to Leigh Hunt, Pisa, Aug. 26, 1821. 



vi.] RESIDENCE AT PISA. 159 

ready blending by subtle transitions with the new thought 
of Jane. One poem, almost terrible in its intensity of 
melancholy, is hardly explicable on the supposition that 
Shelley was quite happy in his home. 1 These words must 
be taken as implying no reflection either upon Mary's love 
for him, or upon his own power to bear the slighter trou- 
bles of domestic life. He was not a spoiled child of fort- 
une, a weak egotist, or a querulous complainer. But he 
was always seeking and never finding the satisfaction of 
some deeper craving. In his own words, he had loved An- 
tigone before he visited this earth : and no one woman 
could probably have made him happy, because he was for 
ever demanding more from love than it can give in the 
mixed circumstances of mortal life. Moreover, it must be 
remembered that his power of self-expression has bestow- 
ed permanent form on feelings which may have been but 
transitory ; nor can we avoid the conclusion that, sincere 
as Shelley was, he, like all poets, made use of the emotion 
of the moment for purposes of art, converting an epheme- 
ral mood into something typical and universal. This was 
almost certainly the case with JEpipsychidion. 

So much at any rate had to be said upon this subject; 
for careful readers of Shelley's minor poems are forced to 
the conviction that during the last year of his life he often 
found relief from a wretchedness, which, however real, can 
hardly be defined, in the sympathy of this true-hearted 
woman. The affection he felt for Jane was beyond ques- 
tion pure and honourable. All the verses he addressed to 
her passed through her husband's hands without the 
slightest interruption to their intercourse; and Mrs. Shel- 
ley, who was not unpardonably jealous of her Ariel, con- 
tinued to be Mrs. Williams's warm friend. A passage from 
1 " The Serpent is shut out from Paradise." 



160 SHELLEY. [chap. 

Shelley's letter of June 18, 1822, expresses the plain prose 
of his relation to the Williarases : — " They are people who 
are very pleasing to me. But words are not the instru- 
ments of our intercourse. I like Jane more and more, 
and I find Williams the most amiable of companions. She 
has a taste for music, and an eloquence of form and mo- 
tions that compensate in some degree for the lack of liter- 
ary refinement." 

Two lyrics of this period may here be introduced, partly 
for the sake of their intrinsic beauty, and partly because 
they illustrate the fecundity of Shelley's genius during the 
months of tranquil industry which he passed at Pisa. The 
first is an Invocation to Night ; — 

Swiftly walk over the western wave, 

Spirit of Night ! 
Out of the misty eastern cave, 
Where all the long and lone daylight, 
Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear, 
Which make thee terrible and dear, — 

Swift be thy flight ! 

Wrap thy form in a mantle grey, 

Star-inwrought ! 
Blind with thine hair the eyes of day, 
Kiss her until she be wearied out. 
Then wander o'er city, and sea, and land, 
Touching all with thine opiate wand — 

Come, long-sought ! 

When I arose and saw the dawn, 

I sighed for thee ; 
When light rode high, and the dew was gone, 
And noon lay heavy on flower and tree, 
And the weary Day turned to his rest, 
Lingering like an unloved guest, 

I sighed for thee. 



vi.] RESIDENCE AT PISA. 161 

Thy brother Death came, and cried, 

" Wouldst thou me ?" 

Thy sweet child Sleep, the filmy-eyed, 

Murmured like a noon-tide bee, 

" Shall I nestle near thy side ? 

Wouldst thou me ?" — And I replied, 
" No, not thee !" 

Death will come when thou art dead, 

Soon, too soon — 
Sleep will come when thou art fled ; 
Of neither would I ask the boon 
I ask of thee, beloved Night — 
Swift be thine approaching flight, 

Come soon, soon ! 

The second is an Epithalamium composed for a drama 
which his friend Williams was writing. Students of the 
poetiG art will find it not uninteresting to compare the 
three versions of this Bridal Song, given by Mr. Forman. 1 
They prove that Shelley was no careless writer. 

The golden gates of sleep unbar 

Where strength and beauty, met together, 

Kindle their image like a star 
In a sea of glassy weather ! 

Night, with all thy stars look down — 

Darkness, weep thy holiest dew ! 
Never smiled the inconstant moon 

On a pair so true. 
Let eyes not see their own delight; 
Haste, swift Hour, and thy flight 

Oft renew. 

Fairies, sprites, and angels, keep her ! 
Holy stars, permit no wrong ! 

1 Vol. iv. p. 89. 



162 SHELLEY. [chap. 

And return to wake the sleeper, 

Dawn, ere it be long. 
joy-! fear ! what will be done 

In the absence of the sun ! 
Come along ! 

Lyrics like these, delicate in thought and exquisitely 
finished in form, were produced with a truly wonderful 
profusion in this season of his happiest fertility. A 
glance at the last section of Mr. Palgrave's Golden Treas- 
ury shows how large a place they occupy among the per- 
manent jewels of our literature. 

The month of January added a new and most impor- 
tant member to the little Pisan circle. This was Cap- 
tain Edward John Trelawny, to whom more than to any 
one else but Hogg and Mrs. Shelley, the students of the 
poet's life are indebted for details at once accurate and 
characteristic. Trelawny had lived a free life in all quar- 
ters of the globe, far away from literary cliques and the 
society of cities, in contact with the sternest realities of 
existence, which had developed his self-reliance and his 
physical qualities to the utmost. The impression, there- 
fore, made on him by Shelley has to be gravely estimated 
by all who still incline to treat the poet as a patholog- 
ical specimen of humanity. This true child of nature 
recognized in his new friend far more than in Byron the 
stuff of a real man. " To form a just idea of his poetry, 
you should have witnessed his daily life; his words and 
actions best illustrated his writings." " The cynic Byron 
acknowledged him to be the best and ablest man he had 
ever known. The truth was, Shelley loved everything 
better than himself." " I have seen Shelley and Byron 
in society, and the contrast was as marked as their charac- 
ters. The former, not thinking of himself, was as much 



vi.] RESIDENCE AT PISA. 163 

at ease as in his own Lome, omitting no occasion of oblig- 
ing those whom he came in contact with, readily convers- 
ing with all or any who addressed him, irrespective of age 
or rank, dress or address." "All who heard him felt the 
charm of his simple, earnest manner : while Byron knew 
him to be exempt from the egotism, pedantry, coxcombry, 
and more than all the rivalry of authorship." " Shelley's 
mental activity was infectious ; he kept your brain in con- 
stant action." "He was always in earnest." "He nev- 
er laid aside his book and magic mantle ; he waved his 
wand, and Byron, after a faint show of defiance, stood 

mute Shelley's earnestness and just criticism held 

him captive." These sentences, and many others, prove 
that Trelawny, himself somewhat of a cynic, cruelly ex- 
posing false pretensions, and detesting affectation in any 
form, paid unreserved homage to the heroic qualities this 
"dreamy bard," — "uncommonly awkward," as he also 
called him — bad rider and poor seaman as he was — " over- 
sensitive," and " eternally brooding on his own thoughts," 
who " had seen no more of the waking-day than a girl at 
a boarding-school." True to himself, gentle, tender, with 
the courage of a lion, " frank and outspoken, like a well- 
conditioned boy, well-bred and considerate for others, be- 
cause he was totally devoid of selfishness and vanity," 
Shelley seemed to this unprejudiced companion of his last 
few months that very rare product for which Diogenes 
searched in vain — a man. 

Their first meeting must be told in Trelawny's own 
words — words no less certain of immortality than the 
fame of him they celebrate. "The Williamses received 
me in their earnest, cordial manner; we had a great deal 
to communicate to each other, and were in loud and ani- 
mated conversation, when I was rather put out by observ 



164 SHELLEY. [chap. 

ing in the passage near the open door, opposite to where 
I sat, a pair of glittering eyes steadily fixed on mine ; it 
was too dark to make out whom they belonged to. With 
the acuteness of a woman, Mrs. Williams's eyes followed 
the direction of mine, and going to the doorway she laugh- 
ingly said, ' Come in, Shelley, it's only our friend Tre just 
arrived.' Swiftly gliding in, blushing like a girl, a tall, 
thin stripling held out both his hands ; and although I 
could hardly believe, as I looked at his flushed, feminine, 
and artless face, that it could be the poet, I returned his 
warm pressure. After the ordinary greetings and courte- 
sies he sat down and listened. I was silent from aston- 
ishment : was it possible this mild-looking, beardless boy, 
could be the veritable monster at war with all the world ? 
— excommunicated by the Fathers of the Church, deprived 
of his civil rights by the fiat of a grim Lord Chancellor, 
discarded by every member of his family, and denounced 
by the rival sages of our literature as the founder of a Sa- 
tanic school? I could not believe it; it must be a hoax. 
He was habited like a boy, in a black jacket and trousers, 
which he seemed to have outgrown, or his tailor, as is the 
custom, had most shamefully stinted him in his ' sizings.' 
Mrs. Williams saw my embarrassment, and to relieve me 
asked Shelley what book he had in his hand? His face 
brightened, and he answered briskly, — 

" ' Calderon's Magico Prodigioso — I am translating 
some passages in it.' 

" ' Oh, read it to us.' 

" Shoved off from the shore of commonplace incidents 
that could not interest him, and fairly launched on a 
theme that did, he instantly became oblivious of every- 
thing but the book in his hand. The masterly manner 
in which he analysed the genius of the author, his lucid 



yl] RESIDENCE AT PISA. 165 

interpretation of the story, and the ease with which he 
translated into our language the most subtle and imagina- 
tive passages of the Spanish poet, were marvellous, as was 
his command of the two languages. After this touch of 
his quality I no longer doubted his identity; a dead si- 
lence ensued ; looking up, I asked, — 

'"Where is he?' 

" Mrs. Williams said, ' Who ? Shelley ? Oh, he comes 
and goes like a spirit, no one knows when or where.' " 

Two little incidents which happened in the winter of 
1821-2 deserve to be recorded. News reached the Pisan 
circle early in December that a man who had insulted the 
Host at Lucca was sentenced to be burned. Shelley pro- 
posed that the English — himself, Byron, Med win, and 
their friend Mr. Taafe — should immediately arm and ride 
off to rescue him. The scheme took Byron's fancy ; but 
they agreed to try less Quixotic measures before they 
had recourse to force, and their excitement was calmed by 
hearing that the man's sentence had been commuted to 
the galleys. The other affair brought them less agreea- 
bly into contact with the Tuscan police. The party were 
riding home one afternoon in March, when a mounted 
dragoon came rushing by, breaking their ranks and nearly 
unhorsing Mr. Taafe. Byron and Shelley rode after him 
to remonstrate ; but the man struck Shelley from his sad- 
dle with a sabre blow. The English then pursued him 
into Pisa, making such a clatter that one of Byron's ser- 
vants issued with a pitchfork from the Casa Lanfranchi, 
and wounded the fellow somewhat seriously, under the 
impression that it was necessary to defend his master. 
Shelley called the whole matter " a trifling piece of busi- 
ness ;" but it was strictly investigated by the authorities ; 
and though the dragoon was found to have been in the 



166 SHELLEY. [chap. 

wrong, Byron had to retire for a season to Leghorn. An- 
other consequence was the exile of Count Gamba and his 
father from Tuscany, which led to Byron's final departure 
from Pisa. 

The even current of Shelley's life was not often broken 
by such adventures. Trelawny gives the following ac- 
count of how he passed his days : he " was up at six or 
seven, reading Plato, Sophocles, or Spinoza, with the ac- 
companiment of a hunch of dry bread; then he joined 
Williams in a sail on the Arno, in a flat-bottomed skiff, 
book in hand, and from thence he went to the pine-forest, 
or some out-of-the-way place. When the birds went to 
roost he returned home, and talked and read until mid- 
night." The great wood of stone pines on the Pisan Ma- 
remma was his favourite study. Trelawny tells us how 
he found him there alone one day, and in what state was 
the MS. of that prettiest lyric, Ariel, to Miranda take. " It 
was a frightful scrawl ; words smeared out with his finger, 
and one upon the other, over and over in tiers, and all run 
together in most ' admired disorder ;' it might have been 
taken for a sketch of a marsh overgrown with bulrushes, 
and the blots for wild ducks ; such a dashed-off daub as 
self-conceited artists mistake for a manifestation of genius. 
On my observing this to him, he answered, ' When my 
brain gets heated with thought, it soon boils, and throws 
off images and words faster than I can skim them off. In 
the morning, when cooled down, out of the rude sketch as 
you justly call it, I shall attempt a drawing." 

A daily visit to Byron diversified existence. Byron 
talked more sensibly with Shelley than with his common- 
place acquaintances ; and when he began to gossip, Shel- 
ley retired into his own thoughts. Then they would go 
pistol-shooting, Byron's trembling hand contrasting with 



tl] RESIDENCE AT PISA. 167 

his friend's firmness. They had invented a "little lan- 
guage " for this sport : firing was called tiring ; hitting, 
colping ; missing, mancating, &c. It was in fact a kind 
of pigeon Italian. Shelley acquired two nick -names in 
the circle of his Pisan friends, both highly descriptive. 
He was Ariel and the Snake. The latter suited him be- 
cause of his noiseless gliding movement, bright eyes, and 
ethereal diet. It was first given to him by Byron during 
a reading of Faust. When he came to the line of Meph- 
istopheles, "Wie meine Muhme, die beruhmte Schlange," 
and translated it, " My aunt, the renowned Snake," Byron 
cried, " Then you are her nephew." Shelley by no means 
resented the epithet. Indeed he alludes to it in his let- 
ters, and in a poem already referred to above. 

Soon after Trelawny's arrival the party turned their 
thoughts to nautical affairs. Shelley had already done a 
good deal of boating with Williams on the Arno and the 
Serchio, and had on one occasion nearly lost his life by 
the capsizing of their tiny craft. They now determined 
to build a larger yacht for excursions on the sea; while 
Byron, liking the project of a summer residence upon the 
Bay of Spezia, made up his mind to have one too. Shel- 
ley's was to be an open boat carrying sail, Byron's a large 
decked schooner. The construction of both was entrusted 
to a Genoese builder, under the direction of Trelawny's 
friend, Captain Roberts. Such was the birth of the ill- 
fated Don Juan, which cost the lives of Shelley and Wil- 
liams, and of the Bolivar, which carried Byron off to 
Genoa before he finally set sail for Greece. Captain Rob- 
erts was allowed to have his own way about the latter; 
but Shelley and Williams had set their hearts upon a mod- 
el for their little yacht, which did not suit the Captain's 
notions of sea-worthiness. Williams overruled his objec- 



168 SHELLEY. [chap. vi. 

tions, and the Don Juan was built according to his cher- 
ished fancy. " When it was finished," says Trelawny, " it 
took two tons of iron ballast to bring her down to her 
bearings, and then she was very crank in a breeze, though 
not deficient in beam. She was fast, strongly built, and 
Torbay rigged." She was christened by Lord Byron, not 
wholly with Shelley's approval ; and one young English 
sailor, Charles Vivian, in addition to Williams and Shelley, 
formed her crew. " It was great fun," says Trelawny, " to 
witness Williams teaching the poet how to steer, and oth- 
er points of seamanship. As usual, Shelley had a book in 
hand, saying he could read and steer at the same time, as 
one was mental, the other mechanical." " The boy was 
quick and handy, and used to boats. Williams was not 
as deficient as I anticipated, but over-anxious, and wanted 
practice, which alone makes a man prompt in emergen- 
cy. Shelley was intent on catching images from the ever- 
changing sea and sky ; he heeded not the boat." 



CHAPTER VII. * 

LAST DAYS. 

The advance of spring made the climate of Pisa too 
hot for comfort ; and early in April Trelawny and Wil- 
liams rode off to find a suitable lodoino' for themselves 
and the Shelleys on the Gulf of Spezia. They pitched 
upon a house called the Villa Magni, between Lerici and 
San Terenzio, which " looked more like a boat or bathing- 
house than a place to live in. It consisted of a terrace 
or ground-floor unpaved, and used for storing boat-gear 
and fishing-tackle, and of a single storey over it, divided 
into a hall or saloon and four small rooms, which had once 
been white-washed; there was one chimney for cooking. 
This place we thought the Shelleys might put up with 
for the summer. The only good thing about it was a 
verandah facing the sea, and almost over it." When it 
came to be inhabited, the central hall was used for the 
living and eating room of the whole party. The Shelleys 
occupied two rooms facing each other; the Williamses 
had one of the remaining chambers, and Trelawny an- 
other. Access to these smaller apartments could only be 
got through the saloon ; and this circumstance once gave 
rise to a ludicrous incident, when Shelley, having lost his 
clothes out bathing, had to cross, in puris naturalibus, not 
undetected, though covered in his retreat by the clever 
8* 



170 SHELLEY. [chap. 

Italian handmaiden, through a luncheon party assembled 
in the dining-room. The horror of the ladies at the poet's 
unexpected apparition and his innocent self-defence are 
well described by Trelawny. Life in the villa was of the 
simplest description. To get food was no easy matter; 
and the style of the furniture may be guessed by Tre- 
lawny's laconic remark that the sea was his only washing- 
basin. 

They arrived at Villa Magni on the 26th of April, and 
began a course of life which was not interrupted till the 
final catastrophe of July 8. These few weeks were in 
many respects the happiest of Shelley's life. We seem to 
discern in his last letter of importance, recently edited by 
Mr. Garnett, that he was now conscious of having reached 
a platform from which he could survey his past achieve- 
ment, and whence he would probably have risen to a 
loftier altitude, by a calmer and more equable exercise of 
powers which had been ripening during the last three 
years of life in Italy.. Meanwhile, " I am content," he 
writes, " if the heaven above me is calm for the passing 
moment." And this tranquillity was perfect, with none 
of the oppressive sense of coming danger, which distin- 
guishes the calm before a storm. He was far away from 
the distractions of the world he hated, in a scene of in- 
describable beauty, among a population little removed 
from the state of savages, who enjoyed the primitive pleas- 
ures of a race at one with nature, and toiled with hardy 
perseverance on the element he loved so well. His com- 
pany was thoroughly congenial and well mixed. He 
spent his days in excursions on the water with Williams, 
or in solitary musings in his cranky little skiff, floating 
upon the shallows in shore, or putting out to sea and wait- 
ing for the landward breeze to bring him home. The 



vil] LAST DAYS. 171 

evenings were passed upon the terrace, listening to Jane's 
guitar, conversing with Trelawny, or reading his favourite 
poets aloud to the assembled party. 

In this delightful solitude, this round of simple occu- 
pations, this uninterrupted communion with nature, Shel- 
ley's enthusiasms and inspirations revived with their old 
strength. He began a poem, which, if we may judge of 
its scale by the fragment we possess, would have been one 
of the longest, as it certainly is one of the loftiest of his 
masterpieces. The Triumph of Life is composed in no 
strain of compliment to the powers of this world, which 
quell untameable spirits, and enslave the noblest by the 
operation of blind passions and inordinate ambitions. It 
is rather a pageant of the spirit dragged in chains, led cap- 
tive to the world, the flesh, and the devil. The sonorous 
march and sultry splendour of the terza rima stanzas, 
bearing on their tide of song those multitudes of forms, 
processionally grand, yet misty with the dust of their own 
tramplings, and half-shrouded in a lurid robe of light, affect 
the imagination so powerfully that we are fain to abandon 
criticism and acknowledge only the daemonic fascinations 
of this solemn mystery. Some have compared the Tri- 
umph of Life to a Panathenaic pomp: others have found 
in it a reflex of the burning summer heat, and blazing 
sea, and onward undulations of interminable waves, which 
were the cradle of its maker as he wrote. The imagery 
of Dante plays a part, and Dante has controlled the struct- 
ure. The genius of the Revolution passes by : Napoleon 
is there, and Rousseau serves for guide. The great of all 
ages are arraigned, and the spirit of the world is brought 
before us, while its heroes pass, unveil their faces for a 
moment, and are swallowed in the throng that has no end- 
ing. But how Shelley meant to solve the problems he 



172 SHELLEY. [chap. 

has raised, by what sublime philosophy he purposed to 
resolve the discords of this revelation more soul-shatter- 
ing than Daniel's Mene, we cannot even guess. The poem, 
as we have it, breaks abruptly with these words : " Then 
what is Life ? I cried " — a sentence of profoundest import, 
when we remember that the questioner was now about to 
seek its answer in the halls of Death. 

To separate any single passage from a poem which owes 
so much of its splendour to the continuity of music and 
the succession of visionary images, does it cruel wrong. 
Yet this must be attempted ; for Shelley is the only Eng- 
lish poet who has successfully handled that most difficult 
of metres, terza rima. His power over complicated versi- 
fication cannot be appreciated except by duly noticing the 
method he employed in treating a structure alien, perhaps, 
to the genius of our literature, and even in Italian used 
with perfect mastery by none but Dante. To select the 
introduction and part of the first paragraph will inflict less 
violence upon the Triumph of Life as a whole, than to 
detach one of its episodes. 

Swift as a spirit hastening to his task 

Of glory and of good, the Sun sprang forth 

Rejoicing in his splendour, and the mask 

Of darkness fell from the awakened Earth. 
The smokeless altars of the mountain snows 
Flamed above crimson clouds, and at the birth 

Of light, the Ocean's orison arose, 

To which the birds tempered their matin lay. 

All flowers in field or forest which unclose 

Their trembling eyelids to the kiss of day, 
Swinging their censers in the element, 
With orient incense lit by the new ray, 



yii.] LAST DAYS. 173 

Burned slow and inconsumably, and sent 
Their odorous sighs up to the smiling air ; 
And, in succession due, did continent, 

Isle, ocean, and all things that in them wear 
The form and character of mortal mould, 
Rise as the Sun their father rose, to bear 

Their portion of the toil, which he of old 
Took as his own, and then imposed on them. 
But I, whom thoughts which must remain untold 

Had kept as wakeful as the stars that gem 
The cone of night, now they were laid asleep, 
Stretched my faint limbs beneath the hoary stem 

Which an old chestnut flung athwart the steep 

Of a green Apennine. Before me fled 

The night ; behind me rose the day ; the deep 

Was at my feet, and Heaven above my head, — 
When a strange trance over my fancy grew 
Which was not slumber, for the shade it spread 

Was so transparent that the scene came through 
As clear as, when a veil of light is drawn 
O'er evening hills, they glimmer ; and I knew 

That I had felt the freshness of that dawn 
Bathe in the same cold dew my brow and hair, 
And sate as thus upon that slope of lawn 

Under the self-same bough, and heard as there 
The birds, the fountains, and the ocean, hold 
Sweet talk in music through the enamoured air. 
And then a vision on my brain was rolled. 

Such is the exordium of the poem. It will be noticed 
that at this point one' series of the interwoven triplets is 
concluded. The Triumph of Life itself begins with a new 



174 SHELLEY. [chap. 

series of rhymes, describing the vision for which prepara- 
tion has been made in the preceding prelude. It is not 
without perplexity that an ear unaccustomed to the wind- 
ings of the terza rima, feels its way among them. En- 
tangled and impeded by the labyrinthine sounds, the reader 
might be compared to one who, swimming in his dreams, 
is carried down the course of a swift river clogged with 
clinging and retarding water-weeds. He moves ; but not 
without labour : yet after a while the very obstacles add 
fascination to his movement. 

As in that trance of wondrous thought I lay, 
This was the tenour of my waking dream : — 
Methought I sate beside a public way 

Thick strewn with summer dust, and a great stream 
Of people there was hurrying to and fro, 
Numerous as gnats upon the evening gleam, 

All hastening onward, yet none seemed to know 
Whither he went, or whence he came, or why 
He made one of the multitude, and so 

Was borne amid the crowd, as through the sky 
One of the million leaves of summer's bier ; 
Old age and youth, manhood and infancy, 

Mixed in one mighty torrent did appear : 

Some flying from the thing they feared, and some 

Seeking the object of another's fear ; 

And others, as with steps towards the tomb, 
Pored on the trodden worms that crawled beneath, 
And others mournfully within the gloom 

Of their own shadow walked and called it death ; 
And some fled from it as it were a ghost, 
Half fainting in the affliction of vain breath. 



vil] LAST DAYS. 175 

But more, with motions which each other crossed, 
Pursued or spurned the shadows the clouds threw, 
Or birds within the noon-day ether lost, 

Upon that path where flowers never grew — 
And weary with vain toil and faint for thirst, 
Heard not the fountains, whose melodious dew 

Out of their mossy cells for ever burst ; 

Nor felt the breeze which from the forest told 

Of grassy paths, and wood-lawn interspersed, 

With over-arching elms, and caverns cold, 

And violet banks where sweet dreams brood ; — but they 

Pursued their serious folly as of old. 

Here let us break the chain of rhymes that are un- 
broken in the text, to notice the extraordinary skill with 
which the rhythm has been woven in one paragraph, sug- 
gesting by recurrences of sound the passing of a multi- 
tude, which is presented at the same time to the eye of 
fancy by accumulated images. The next eleven triplets 
introduce the presiding genius of the pageant. Students 
of Petrarch's Trionfi will not fail to note what Shelley 
owes to that poet, and how he has transmuted the definite 
imagery of mediaeval symbolism into something meta- 
physical and mystic. 

And as I gazed, methought that in the way 
The throng grew wilder, as the woods of June 
When the south wind shakes the extinguished day ; 

And a cold glare, intenser than the noon 
But icy cold, obscured with blinding light 
The sun, as he the stars. Like the young moon — 

When on the sunlit limits of the night 

Her white shell trembles amid crimson air, 

And whilst the sleeping tempest gathers might, — 



176 SHELLEY. [chap, 

Doth, as the herald of its coming, bear 

The ghost of its dead mother, whose dim form 

Bends in dark ether from her infant's chair ; 

So came a chariot on the silent storm 

Of its own rushing splendour, and a Shape 

So sate within, as one whom years deform, 

Beneath a dusky hood and double cape, 
Crouching within the shadow of a tomb. 
And o'er what seemed the head a cloud-like crape 

Was bent, a dun and faint ethereal gloom 
Tempering the light. Upon the chariot beam 
A Janus-visaged Shadow did assume 



The guidance of that wonder-winged team ; 
The shapes which drew it in thick lightnings 
Were lost : — I heard alone on the air's soft stream 

The music of their ever-moving wings. 

All the four faces of that charioteer 

Had their eyes banded ; little profit brings 

Speed in the van and blindness in the rear, 
Nor then avail the beams that quench the sun, 
Or that with banded eyes could pierce the sphere 

Of all that is, has been, or will be done. 
So ill was the car guided — but it past 
With solemn speed majestically on. 

The intense stirring of his imagination implied by this 
supreme poetic effort, the solitude of Villa Magni, and the 
elemental fervour of Italian heat to which he recklessly 
exposed himself, contributed to make Shelley more than 
usually nervous. His somnambulism returned, and he saw 
visions. On one occasion he thought that the dead Alle- 
gra rose from the sea, and clapped her hands, and laughed, 
and beckoned to him. On another he roused the whole 



vil] LAST DAYS. 177 

house at night by his screams, and remained terror-frozen 
in the trance produced by an appalling vision. This 
mood he communicated, in some measure, to his friends. 
One of them saw what she afterwards believed to have 
been his phantom, and another dreamed that he was dead. 
They talked much of death, and it is noticeble that the 
last words written to him by Jane were these : — "Are you 
going to join your friend Plato ?" 

The Leigh Hunts at last arrived in Genoa, whence they 
again sailed for Leghorn. Shelley heard the news upon 
the- 20th of June. He immediately prepared to join 
them ; and on the 1st of July set off with Williams in 
the Don Juan for Leghorn, where he rushed into the arms 
of his old friend. Leigh Hunt, in his autobiography, 
writes, " I will not dwell upon the moment." From Leg- 
horn he drove with the Hunts to Pisa, and established 
them in the ground-floor of Byron's Palazzo Lanfranchi, 
as comfortably as was consistent with his lordship's varia- 
ble moods. The negotiations which had preceded Hunt's 
visit to Italy, raised forebodings in Shelley's mind as to 
the reception he would meet from Byron ; nor were these 
destined to be unfulfilled. Trelawny tells us how irksome 
the poet found it to have " a man with a sick wife, and 
seven disorderly children," established in his palace. To 
Mrs. Hunt he was positively brutal ; nor could he tolerate 
her self-complacent husband, who, while he had voyaged 
far and wide in literature, had never wholly cast the 
slough of Cockneyism. Hunt was himself hardly power- 
ful enough to understand the true magnitude of Shelley, 
though he loved him ; and the tender solicitude of the 
great, unselfish Shelley, for the smaller, harmlessly con- 
ceited Hunt, is pathetic. They spent a pleasant day or 
two together, Shelley showing the Campo Santo and other 



178 SHELLEY. [chap. 

sights of Pisa to his English friend. Hunt thought him 
somewhat less hopeful than he used to be, but improved 
in health and strength and spirits. One little touch re- 
lating to their last conversation, deserves to be recorded : 
— "He assented warmly to an opinion I expressed in the 
cathedral at Pisa, while the organ was playing, that a truly 
divine religion might yet be established, if charity were 
really made the principle of it, instead of faith." 

On the night following that day of rest, Shelley took a 
postchaise for Leghorn ; and early in the afternoon of the 
next day he set sail, with Williams, on his return voyage 
to Lerici. The sailor-boy, Charles Vivian, was their only 
companion. Trelawny, who was detained on board the 
Bolivar, in the Leghorn harbour, watched them start. The 
weather for some time had been unusually hot and dry. 
" Processions of priests and religiosi have been for several 
days past praying for rain ;" so runs the last entry in 
Williams's diary ; "but the gods are either angry or nature 
too powerful." Trelawny's Genoese mate observed, as the 
Don Juan stood out to sea, that they ought to have start- 
ed at three a. m. instead of twelve hours later; adding 
"the devil is brewing mischief." Then a sea -fog with- 
drew the Don Juan from their sight. It was an oppres- 
sively sultry afternoon. Trelawny went down into his 
cabin, and slept ; but was soon roused by the noise of the 
ships' crews in the harbour making all ready for a gale. 
In a short time the tempest was upon them, with wind, 
rain, and thunder. It did not last more than twenty min- 
utes; and at its end Trelawny looked out anxiously for 
Shelley's boat. She was nowhere to be seen, and nothing 
could be heard of her. In fact, though Trelawny could 
not then be absolutely sure of the catastrophe, she had 
sunk, struck in all probability by the prow of a felucca, 



til] LAST DAYS. 179 

but whether by accident or with the intention of running 
her down, is still uncertain. 

On the morning of the third day after the storm, Tre- 
lawny rode to Pisa, and communicated his fears to Hunt. 
" I then went upstairs to Byron. When I told him, his 
lip quivered, and his voice faltered as he questioned me." 
Couriers were despatched to search the sea-coast, and to 
bring the Bolivar from Leghorn. Trelawny rode in per- 
son toward Via Reggio, and there found a punt, a water- 
keg, and some bottles, which had been in Shelley's boat. 
A. week passed, Trelawny patrolling the shore with the 
coast-guardsmen, but hearing of no new discovery, until 
at last two bodies were cast upon the sand. One found 
near Yia Reggio, on the 18th of July, was Shelley's. It 
had his jacket, " with the volume of ^Eschylus in one 
pocket, and Keats's poems in the other, doubled back, as 
if the reader, in the act of reading, had hastily thrust it 
away." The other, found near the tower of Migliarino, 
at about four miles' distance, was that of Williams. The 
sailor-boy, Charles Vivian, though cast up on the same day, 
the 18th of July, near Massa, was not heard of by Trelaw- 
ny till the 29th. 

Nothing now remained but to tell the whole dreadful 
truth to the two # widowed women, who had spent the last 
days in an agony of alternate despair and hope at Villa 
Magni. This duty Trelawny discharged faithfully and 
firmly. " The next day I prevailed on them," he says, 
"to return with me to Pisa. The misery of that night 
and the journey of the next day, and of many days and 
nights that followed, I can neither describe nor forget." 
It was decided that Shelley should be buried at Rome, 
near his friend Keats and his son William, and that Wil- 
liams's remains should be taken to England. But first 



180 SHELLEY. [chap. 

the bodies had to be burned ; and for permission to do 
this Trelawny, who all through had taken the lead, ap- 
plied to the English Embassy at Florence. After some 
difficulty it was granted. 

What remains to be said concerning the cremation of 
Shelley's body on the 6th of August, must be told in 
Trelawny's own words. Williams, it may be stated, had 
been burned on the preceding day. 

"Three white wands had been stuck in the sand to 
mark the poet's grave, but as they were at some distance 
from each other, we had to cut a trench thirty yards in 
length, in the line of the sticks, to ascertain the exact spot, 
and it was nearly an hour before we came upon the grave. 

"In the meantime Byron and Leigh Hunt arrived in 
the carriage, attended by soldiers, and the Health Officer, 
as before. The lonely and grand scenery that surrounded 
us, so exactly harmonized with Shelley's genius, that I 
could imagine his spirit soaring over us. The sea, with 
the islands of Gorgona, Capraja, and Elba, was before us ; 
old battlemented watch-towers stretched along the coast, 
backed by the marble-crested Apennines glistening in the 
sun, picturesque from their diversified outlines, and not a 
human dwelling was in sight. 

"As I thought of the delight Shelley felt in such scenes 
of loneliness and grandeur whilst living, I felt we were no 
better than a herd of wolves or a pack of wild "dogs, in 
tearing out his battered and naked body from the pure 
yellow sand that lay so lightly over it, to drag him back to 
the light of day ; but the dead have no voice, nor had I 
power to check the sacrilege — the work went on silently 
in the deep and unresisting sand, not a word was spoken, 
for the Italians have a touch of sentiment, and their feel- 
ings are easily excited into sympathy. Byron was silent 



til] LAST DAYS. 181 

and thoughtful. We were startled and drawn together 
by a dull, hollow sound that followed the blow of a mat- 
tock ; the iron had struck a skull, and the body was soon 
uncovered After the fire was well kindled we re- 
peated the ceremony of the previous day ; and more wine 
was poured over Shelley's dead body than he had con- 
sumed during his life. This with the oil and salt made 
the yellow flames glisten and quiver. The heat from the 
sun and fire was so intense that the atmosphere was trem- 
ulous and wavy The fire was so fierce as to pro- 
duce a white heat on the iron, and to reduce its contents 
to grey ashes. The only portions that were not consumed 
were some fragments of bones, the jaw, and the skull; 
but what surprised us all was that the heart remained en- 
tire. In snatching this relic from the fiery furnace, my 
hand was severely burnt ; and had any one seen me do the 
act, I should have been put into quarantine." 

Shelley's heart was given to Hunt, who subsequently, 
not without reluctance and unseemly dispute, resigned it 
to Mrs. Shelley. It is now at Boscombe. His ashes were 
carried by Trelawny to Rome and buried in the Protes- 
tant cemetery, so touchingly described by him in his let- 
ter to Peacock, and afterwards so sublimely in Adonais. 
The epitaph, composed by Hunt, ran thus : " Percy Bysshe 
Shelley, Cor Cordium, Natus iv. Aug. mdccxcii. Obiit 
vni Jul. mdcccxxii." To the Latin words Trelawny, 
faithfullest and most devoted of friends, added three lines 
from Ariel's song, much loved in life by Shelley : 

Nothing of him that doth fade, 
But doth suffer a sea-change 
Into something rich and strange. 

" And so," writes Lady Shelley, " the sea and the earth 



182 SHELLEY. [chap. vii. 

closed over one who was great as a poet, and still greater 
as a philanthropist ; and of whom it may be said, that his 
wild spiritual character seems to have prepared him for 
being thus snatched from life under circumstances of min- 
gled terror and beauty, while his powers were yet in their 
spring freshness, and age had not come to render the 
ethereal body decrepit, or to wither the heart which could 
not be consumed by fire." 



CHAPTER VIII. 

EPILOGUE. 

After some deliberation I decided to give this little 
work on Shelley the narrative rather than the essay form, 
impelled thereto by one commanding reason. Shelley's 
life and his poetry are indissolubly connected. He acted 
what he thought and felt, with a directness rare among 
his brethren of the poet's craft; while his verse, with the 
exception of The Cenci, expressed little but the animating 
thoughts and aspirations of his life. That life, moreover, 
was " a miracle of thirty years," so crowded with striking- 
incident and varied experience that, as he said himself, he 
had already lived longer than his father, and ought to be 
reckoned with the men of ninety. Through all vicissi- 
tudes he preserved his -youth inviolate, and died, like one 
whom the gods love, or like a hero of Hellenic story, 
young, despite grey hairs and suffering. His life has, 
therefore, to be told, in order that his life-work may be 
rightly valued : for, great as that was, he, the man, was 
somehow greater ; and noble as it truly is, the memory 
of himself is nobler. 

To the world he presented the rare spectacle of a man 
passionate for truth, and unreservedly obedient to the right 
as he discerned it. The anomaly which made his practical 



184 SHELLEY. [chap. 

career a failure, lay just here. The right he followed was 
too often the antithesis of ordinary morality : in his desire 
to cast away the false and grasp the true, he overshot the 
mark of prudence. The blending in him of a pure and 
earnest purpose with moral and social theories that could 
not but have proved pernicious to mankind at large, pro- 
duced at times an almost grotesque mixture in his actions 
no less than in his verse. We cannot, therefore, wonder 
that society, while he lived, felt the necessity of asserting 
itself against him. But now that he has passed into the 
company of the great dead, and time has softened down 
the asperities of popular judgment, we are able to learn 
the real lesson of his life and writings. That is not to be 
sought in any of his doctrines, but rather in his fearless 
bearing, his resolute loyalty to an unselfish and in the sim- 
plest sense benevolent ideal. It is this which constitutes 
his supreme importance for us English at the present time. 
Ours is an age in which ideals are rare, and we belong to 
a race in which men who follow them so single-heartedly 
are not common. 

As a poet, Shelley contributed a new quality to English 
literature — a quality of ideality, freedom, and spiritual au- 
dacity, which severe critics of other nations think we lack. 
Byron's daring is in a different region: his elemental 
worldliness and pungent satire do viot liberate our ener- 
gies, or cheer us with new hopes and splendid vistas. 
Wordsworth, the very antithesis to Shelley in his reverent 
accord with institutions, suits our meditative mood, sus- 
tains us with a sound philosophy, and braces us by healthy 
contact with the Nature he so dearly loved. But in 
Wordsworth there is none of Shelley's magnetism. What 
remains of permanent value in Coleridge's poetry — such 
work as Christabel, the Ancient Mariner, or Kubla Khan 



viii.] EPILOGUE. 185 

— is a product of pure artistic fancy, tempered by the au- 
thor's mysticism. Keats, true and sacred poet as he was, 
loved Nature with a somewhat sensuous devotion. She 
was for him a mistress rather than a Diotima; nor did 
he share the prophetic fire which burns in Shelley's verse, 
quite apart from the direct enunciation of his favourite 
tenets. In none of Shelley's greatest contemporaries was 
the lyrical faculty so paramount ; and whether we consid- 
er his minor songs, his odes, or his more complicated cho- 
ral dramas, we acknowledge that he was the loftiest and 
the most spontaneous singer of our language. In range 
of power he was also conspicuous above the rest. Not 
only did he write the best lyrics, but the best tragedy, the 
best translations, and the best familiar poems of his centu- 
ry. As a satirist and humourist, I cannot place him so 
high as some of his admirers do ; and the purely polemi- 
cal portions of his poems, those in which he puts forth his 
antagonism to tyrants and religions and custom in all its 
myriad forms, seem to me to degenerate at intervals into 
poor rhetoric. 

While his genius was so varied and its flight so unap- 
proached in swiftness, it would be vain to deny that Shel- 
ley, as an artist, had faults from which the men with whom 
I have compared him were more free. The most promi- 
nent of these are haste, incoherence, verbal carelessness, 
incompleteness, a want of narrative force, and a weak hold 
on objective realities. Even his warmest admirers, if they 
are sincere critics, will concede that his verse, taken alto- 
gether, is marked by inequality. In his eager self-aban- 
donment to inspiration, he produced much that is unsatis- 
fying simply because it is not ripe. There was no defect 
of power in him, but a defect of patience ; and the final 
word to be pronounced in estimating the larger bulk of 
9 



186 SHELLEY. [chap. 

his poetry is the word immature. Not only was the poet 
young ; but the fruit of his young* mind had been pluck- 
ed before it had been duly mellowed by reflection. Again, 
he did not care enough for common things to present 
them with artistic fulness. He was intolerant of detail, 
and thus failed to model with the roundness that we find 
in Goethe's work. He flew at the grand, the spacious, the 
sublime ; and did not always succeed in realizing for his 
readers what he had imagined. A certain want of faith 
in his own powers, fostered by the extraordinary . dis- 
couragement under which he had to write, prevented him 
from finishing what he began, or from giving that ulti- 
mate form of perfection to his longer works which we ad- 
mire in shorter pieces like the Ode to the West Wind. 
When a poem was ready, he had it hastily printed, and 
passed on to fresh creative efforts. If anything occurred 
to interrupt his energy, he flung the sketch aside. Some 
of these defects, if we may use this word at all to indicate 
our sense that Shelley might by care have been made equal 
to his highest self, were in a great measure the correlative 
of his chief quality — the ideality, of which I have already 
spoken. He composed with all his faculties, mental, emo- 
tional, and physical, at the utmost strain, at a white heat 
of intense fervour, striving to attain one object, the truest 
and most passionate investiture for the thoughts which 
had inflamed his ever - quick imagination. The result is 
that his finest work has more the stamp of something nat- 
ural and elemental — the wind, the sea, the depth of air— 
than of a mere artistic product. Plato would have said : 
the Muses filled this man with sacred madness, and, when 
he wrote, he was no longer in his own control. There 
was, moreover, ever-present in his nature an effort, an as- 
piration after a better than the best this world can show, 



viil] EPILOGUE. 187 

which, prompted him to blend the choicest products of his 
thought and fancy with the fairest images borrowed from 
the earth on which he lived. He never willingly com- 
posed except under the impulse to body forth a vision of 
the love and light and life which was the spirit of the 
power he worshipped. This persistent upward striving, 
this earnestness, this passionate intensity, this piety of soul 
and purity of inspiration, give a quite unique spirituality 
to his poems. But it cannot be expected that the colder 
perfections of Academic art should be always found in 
them. They have something of the waywardness and 
neo-lio-ence of nature, something of the asymmetreia we ad- 
mire in the earlier creations of Greek architecture. That 
Shelley, acute critic and profound student as he was, could 
conform himself to rule and show himself an artist in the 
stricter sense, is, however, abundantly proved by The Cen- 
ci and by Adonais. The reason why he did not always 
observe this method will be understood by those who have 
studied his Defence of Poetry, and learned to sympathize 
with his impassioned theory of art. 

Working on this small scale, it is difficult to do barest 
justice to Shelley's life or poetry. The materials for the 
former are almost overwhelmingly copious and strangely 
discordant. Those who ought to meet in love over his 
grave, have spent their time in quarrelling about him, and 
baffling the most eager seeker for the truth. 1 Through 
the turbid atmosphere of their recriminations it is impos- 
sible to discern the whole personality of the man. By 
careful comparison and refined manipulation of the bio- 
graphical treasures at our disposal, a fair portrait of Shel- 

1 See Lady Shelley v. Hogg ; Trelawny v. the Shelley family ; Pea- 
cock v. Lady Shelley ; Garnett v. Peacock ; Garnett v. Trelawny ; 
McCarthy v. Hogg, &c, &c. 



188 SHELLEY. [chap. 

ley might still be set before the reader with the accuracy 
of a finished picture. That labour of exquisite art and of 
devoted love still remains to be accomplished, though in 
the meantime Mr. W. M. Rossetti's Memoir is a most valu- 
able instalment. Shelley in his lifetime bound those who 
knew him with a chain of loyal affection, impressing ob- 
servers so essentially different as Hogg, Byron, Peacock, 
Leigh Hunt, Trelawny, Medwin, Williams, with the con- 
viction that he was the gentlest, purest, bravest, and most 
spiritual being they had ever met. The same conviction 
is forced upon his biographer. During his four last years 
this most loveable of men was becoming gradually riper, 
wiser, truer to his highest instincts. The imperfections of 
his youth were being rapidly absorbed. His self-knowl- 
edge was expanding, his character mellowing, and his gen- 
ius growing daily stronger. Without losing the fire that 
burned in him, he had been lessoned by experience into 
tempering its fervour; and when he reached the age of 
twenty-nine, he stood upon the height of his most glori- 
ous achievement, ready to unfold his wings for a yet sub- 
limer flight. At that moment, when life at last seemed 
about to offer him rest, unimpeded activity, and happiness, 
death robbed the world of his maturity. Posterity has 
but the product of his cruder years, the assurance that he 
had already outlived them into something nobler, and the 
tragedy of his untimely end. 

If a final word were needed to utter the unutterable 
sense of waste excited in us by Shelley's premature ab- 
sorption into the mystery of the unknown, we might find 
it in the last lines of his own Alastor : — 

Art and eloquence, 
And all the shows o' the world, are frail and vain 
To weep a loss that turns their light to shade. 



vni.] EPILOGUE. 189 

It is a woe "too deep for tears," when all 
Is reft at once, when some surpassing spirit, 
Whose light adorned the world around it, leaves 
Those who remain behind nor sobs nor groans, 
The passionate tumult of a clinging hope ; 
But pale despair and cold tranquillity, 
Nature's vast frame, the web of human things, 
Birth and the grave, that are not as they were. 



THE END. 



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